A Tree Grows in Daicheng by Lu Nei: book review

A Tree Grows in Daicheng (2014, English translation 2017) is set in Daicheng, China, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.

The narrator is the child of mother Li Suhua and father Gu Dahong, a clerk in the state-owned photography studio.

Gu Dahong’s friend, Fang the Butcher, was 20 years old in 1967, the year the Red Guards put up a barricade on Liberation Road on the east side of Rose Street. Along Rose Street, the shops hide the secrets of their owners’ lives.

Fang the Butcher liked Li Suhua’s younger sister, Li Hongxia, a Red Guard Commander, but the Butcher had joined the rebel faction, the Sharp Knife Camp, ‘which consisted entirely of pig slayers and meat sellers.’ Although it soon disbanded, Fang knew he was on the ‘wrong side’ of Li Hongxia’s government loyalty.

Torture changed Fang the Butcher forever.

The main focus of the story is on Gu Xiaoyan (Sister) and her younger brother Gu Xiaoshan (Boy), whose head tilts to the right, a ‘wonky head’ as a result of muscular torticollis. Boy finds friendship with another disabled boy, and love with Luo Jia. But she doesn’t love him.

The novel is rather disjointed and aimless, so it takes an effort to persevere to the end. It tells the story of a rural village, its residents, and the changing social and political landscape of China. Events such as the first television in the street in 1980, the typhoon, and the rise of new hotels and commercialism, are told in a lanquid way. But underneath all this is rejection, repression, the coming of age, and pain.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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