2025 #89
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square
Read 08.04.25 to 06.05.25, reviewed 01.06.25
Rating: 4.2
This debut bildungsroman (novel about growing up) was shortlisted for the Authors' Club First Novel Award. It is the story of Lai, a girl growing up in Beijing, China's capital city, in the 1970s and 1980s. The title, Tiananmen Square, is a place of huge historical importance. This is the huge public square where a protest movement calling for political and economic change was brutally suppressed in May 1989. Lai Wen is a pseudonym - the author profile says that she was born in 1970 and now lives in the UK with her husband and daughters. While the story may well be very autobiographical, there may be details which are slightly different. For example, Lai's age in the novel is never exact, but from details about her awareness of events in the city/country/world around her, and when she starts high school and university, she might be a year or two older than the author.
As a reader, my own age and background very much shapes how I read this particular novel - I was born in 1969 and lived in China with my mum, a British scholar/academic in Chinese Studies, for a year in 1975/1976 - after the Cultural Revolution and before Mao Zedong's death in September 1976. I think that because of this I really appreciated the way that Lai often relates things in her own life to these external events, more so than in most memoirs or autobiographical fiction, for example situating her memories by saying that something happened a couple of years after Mao's death.
Lai lives with her parents, grandmother and baby brother in a flat in Beijing. The family home is small and not luxurious, but her father is an academic from an educated background. Apparently he suffered during the Cultural Revolution, but has been able to return to a reasonably good job and a home in Beijing. Lai never knows much about the details of her parents' past lives. She does very well at school and moves to a good high school and eventually to university. One of her friends from childhood onwards has a father in government - although she doesn't seem aware of this, this suggests that Lai has far more opportunity available to her than most girls her age. The whole family dotes on Lai's little brother - this is in the era of the one child policy intended to limit population - and the family don't suffer any sanction.
Lai's story starts with childhood memories but much more of the space and detail of the story is of her high school and student years, her friendship and love for her childhood friend Gen. I felt for Lai when she was disappointed (and I couldn't really see the appeal of Gen who I thought was unpleasant both as a child and as a young man) and was more interested by her new circle of rebellious friends with an interest in drama and performance, including the mysterious Anna and a gay male couple. The story then builds up to the final scenes of Tiananmen Square and the historic events on 1989.
This is an absorbing and thought provoking read. It often left me puzzling over various questions, as I think Lai has to - this seems quite realistic for a Chinese woman of her generation. I would love to see where the writer goes in her next work after a debut which seems so rooted in personal experience, so autobiographical.