By Charles N. Li

Born close to the start of worldwide conflict II, Li Na used to be the youngest son of a filthy rich chinese language govt reliable. He observed his father jailed for treason and his family's fortunes dashed while Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists got here to energy in 1945. He watched from his aunt's Shanghai house because the Communist military seized town in 1948. He skilled the heady materialism of the decadent international "white ghosts" in British Hong Kong and starved in the harsh confines of a Communist reform university. Over the process twenty-one tumultuous years, he went from Li Na, the dutiful chinese language son longing for a stern, manipulative father's love, to Charles, an self sustaining chinese language American looking no one's approval yet his personal. Lyrical and luminous, excessive and awesome, The sour Sea is an unforgettable precise tale of a tender guy, his father, and his state.

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Extra resources for The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China Before Mao

Sample text

They had already confiscated our guard’s handgun when he opened the iron gate to let their jeep in. I saw the drama unfolding from my balcony perch. The plainclothes agents looked officious and menacing. They disappeared into the house without opening their mouths once. Several minutes later, they reappeared with Father in their midst. He was casually dressed—one of the few times I’d ever seen him without a tie and jacket—and his face was grim. But he held his head high and looked straight ahead as the agents marched him to the jeep.

Sometimes I wondered why the sun did not shine twenty-four hours a day so that I could avoid sleeping altogether. Yet here was Juan-Juan, who wished to rest at all times, as if she longed for perpetual darkness, as if she didn’t want to see and hear and feel what was around her. Her penchant for inactivity and idleness so astonished me that I thought of her more as a seated statue than a living being. After she came to share my living quarters, I spent more and more time on my balcony alone, indulging in wild fantasies about war.

Even then, it was a forced error committed in a vexing historical context. As a rule, a father does not confess to a son. But by this time I was already in my thirties, an established academic in America, safely removed from the traditional framework of Chinese culture. Father almost treated me as an equal when we saw each other in the 1970s and eighties. I was moved by his emotions and the eloquent defense of his political career, but I knew that no rendition of historical context could expiate his willing participation in Wang Jing-wei’s “Vichy” government after the Japanese army had committed unspeakable crimes against Chinese civilians.

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