PC Reading List

I just got back from Shanghai, and while there, I was able to do something that I like to practice — to read a book about the place I was visiting.

The House of Memory, by Nicholas Clifford, is  a very interesting story.  Clifford’s background is as a historian.  This showed sometimes in a writing style that was not quite what I normally would associate with fiction, but it made for quite an interesting read.  I have read a number of Shanghai-based stories, fiction and non-fiction, and this ranks very high amongst its peers.

Clifford ties in Shanghai’s history in the 1920s with the events of 1989, when the students were protesting in (and eventually driven out of) Tiananmen Square.  I checked with some of my local friends to find out the accuracy of the things presented in the tale concerning the 1989 events — whether this was really how things were reported in Shanghai, etc.  (This is something my friends and I have discussed many times — they were university students during that period, as was I.)  I do know that reprts of students’ deaths in Beijing were quite surpressed in other parts of China, and that there was a good deal of confusion regarding what had happened.  That was quite well-captured in the book.

One thing that was also there, but you might have to read between the lines to get it, is that in the minds of those who lived through the events of 1989, Tiananmen is not as major an event as it is to many Westerners.  It is not that they see it as completely insignificant, but that it is not as overwhelming when seen against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, which was a much more devastating event in the lives of most Chinese of that generation.  Those who see the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a huge-scale event are probably those who have fled overseas (i.e., leaders of that movement).  But for those who remained in China, it was a bad thing, but not the worst thing they’d lived through up to that point.  

I enjoyed the way the novel set the 1989 events against a look at another time in China’s history, and focused it on Shanghai’s role in that history.  The 1920s were an exciting time, with the winds of change sweeping across the land.  For all that it was a brutal and unkind era, it was an important one too.  The House of Memory does a very nice job situating that time period, and showing how subsequent history might be viewed a little differently when that era is kept in view.

You can pick the novel up on Amazon.  I haven’t read it yet, but if his site is any indication, this guy can write.  Enjoy.