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In 1898 reformist intellectuals in China persuaded the young emperor that it was time to transform his sclerotic empire into a prosperous modern state. The Hundred Days’ Reform that followed was a moment of unprecedented change and extraordinary hope—brought to an abrupt end by a bloody military coup. Dashed expectations would contribute to the revolutionary turn that Chinese history would soon take, leading in time to the deaths of millions.
Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at his estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative. This mysterious man has a great vision of reforging China as an egalitarian utopia, and he will stop at nothing to make it real. It is his own plans, however, which come to nothing, and his “little sister” Xiumi is left to take up arms against a Confucian world in which women are chattel. Her campaign for change and her struggle to seize control over her own body are continually threatened by the violent whims of men who claim to be building paradise.
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Release date
December 8, 2020 -
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781681374710
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781681374710
- File size: 1127 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from August 10, 2020
Chinese writer Ge Fei (The Invisibility Cloak) begins a trilogy with an engrossing retelling of the Peach Blossom Paradise myth, about a fisherman who, after briefly discovering a utopian society hidden from the outside world, is unable to find it again. The story takes place during China’s failed Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898, and the myth serves as a metaphor for the fleeting idealism of revolutionaries. After a landowner vanishes from the Chinese village of Puji, an intellectual appears on the estate and openly challenges China’s dynastic traditions, captivating the landowner’s daughter, Xiumi. When the intellectual’s body later turns up bloated in a river, his diary is confiscated by Xiumi, who learns of his involvement in a shadowy pro-republic revolutionary group. Xiumi is then kidnapped into sexual slavery by criminals protected by the government, and after she escapes, she becomes radicalized and determines to organize her village against rural anarchy and imperialist rapacity. Rather than offering a well-trodden narrative of romance and revolution, Ge Fei shows that a determined revolutionary isn’t necessarily a shrewd one. Xiumi fails to revolutionize Puji and pays dearly for her attempt. Whether the cost was worth it may be what the subsequent volumes seek to answer in this stirring, illuminating saga.
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