cover image Ming: A Novel of Seventeenth-Century China

Ming: A Novel of Seventeenth-Century China

Robert B. Oxnam. St. Martin's Press, $21.95 (270pp) ISBN 978-0-312-11315-5

Oxnam (Cinnabar) animates a tumultuous period in Chinese history with this highly interesting tale of love and adventure in the collapsing Ming dynasty of the 1600s. Longyan is the less-favored second son of a once-powerful scholar who has brought shame on his family because he can't read (he suffers from dyslexia). He falls in love with Meihua, a sheltered young woman who has secretly learned to read and write, but she is betrothed to his half-brother. Befriended by a Jesuit priest whose ``barbarian'' ideas offer alternatives to rigid Confucian beliefs, the would-be lovers communicate through letters (Longyan, now rising in the military, dictates his). They manage to survive the chaotic political and social transition of the Manchu invasion (during which Meihua forms the Ladies' Filial Piety Society into a small, effective army), and ultimately both are exiled to a desolate island where their long devotion is rewarded. Oxnam, who is president emeritus of the Asia Society, brings a wealth of detail to his narrative, depicting the private lives of the 17th-century Chinese elite and injecting the local color of Suzhou and Beijing. But the novel is driven more by Longyan and Meihua's shifting relationships to the world around them than by their relationships to each other, leading the reader at times to feel that Oxman is more adept at illuminating a period of history than he is at creating psychologically motivated characters. (Jan.)