Liu Sola: Chaos & All That Cloth

In her first work of fiction since entering self-imposed exile, Chinese composer, playwright, author Liu has created a brilliant kaleidoscope drawn from colorful fragments of widely divergent worlds. Published in Hong Kong in 1991, this story of a London student haunted by youthful memories of Maoist Beijing, has not yet appeared in China. Liu's heroine, Huang Haha writes down her memories, a ``ragbag of half-told stories, half-formed ideas and half-remembered incidents,'' which nonetheless seem more vivid and real than life in cold, gray, bland London. Following her father's death in custody, Haha's household was headed by her mother and ``Auntie,'' a family friend who instilled in Haha a love of traditional Chinese opera, and quotations from these operas, along with nursery rhymes, revolutionary songs and Chinese and Western pop songs appear throughout. Haha, whose name is sometimes apt and sometimes bitterly ironic, tells humorous, often scatalogical tales about the perils of village latrines or friends who practiced loud and offensive cursing-seemingly the main criterion for membership in the Red Guards. In London, Haha lives for letters from her friends; copes with an uncommitted English boyfriend who already has a fiancee; and relies on Chinese women friends for companionship and understanding. This is a literate novel, rich with references to Chinese and Western literature, that asks how to preserve the soul of a civilization in the face of inexorable modernization and explores the divided consciousness of the individual expatriate. (Nov.)