Someone to Talk To

The emotional struggles of China’s rural poor fill this ponderous, bifurcated novel from Liu (I Did Not Kill My Husband), a previous winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize. Baishun flees his home, Yang Village, after discovering his father’s plot to deny him an education so that he continues in the family business of tofu making. He is forced to work as a butcher, a porter, a Catholic missionary’s apprentice, and a magistrate’s gardener. “Each change,” Liu writes, “had taken an edge off his personality, removing the possibility of merrymaking from his life,” so his eventual marriage to the widowed owner of a bun shop is destined for failure. Sixty years later, Baishun’s stepdaughter, Qiaoling, tells stories to her grandson, Aiguo, about Baishun and how Qiaoling’s own traumatic kidnapping separated her from him. Aiguo’s journey parallels Baishun’s: he too struggles to find his place in society, bouncing among the military, a bit job as a truck driver, and his own failed marriage until he realizes “he’d lost his sense of self.” Aiguo is ultimately compelled to return to his hometown of Niu Village, though with fading hopes of finding meaning through reconnecting with his family legacy. Though Liu does an admirable job of capturing the breadth of 20th-century Chinese culture, it’s hardly worth plodding through this monotonous novel to uncover the commonplace wisdom about relationships that he offers as a foundation to his expansive vision. (Mar.)