Life by Lu Yao: book review

Life (2019) is set in rural China at the beginning of the 1980s.

Gao Sanxing is a teacher, ‘bestowing some dignity’ on the family, but his twenty-four year old brother Gao Jialin has a major decision to make when his job as a community teacher is terminated: stay in his rural village where life is familiar, and he can continue writing poetry, or move to the exciting city, an hour away, where life is unknown.

Gao Jialin contemplates what to do as he sells steamed buns. Liu Qiaozhen is glad Gao Jialin is a peasant again – she is in love with him. She does not want him to move to the city.

In Part Two, Gao Jialin rejects rural life, but he is confronted by a thunderstorm and flooding when he enters the city. Homes are destroyed and people have nowhere to go. This is not a good start. However, he takes the hardship and transforms it into an opportunity: ‘He knew that he had followed a rainbow, but he had preferred to see it as a bridge.’

In the city he meets Huang Yaping, a woman with ‘modern’ ideas. His sudden appearance had ‘turned her peaceful world upside down’ – she is in love with him. She does not want him to return to the country.

Now what was he to do. He had a choice of two locations, two loves, and two lives.

Liu Qiaozhen joins Sanxing on his tractor, for he is now in the agricultural machinery bureau, and they travel together to the city to surprise Gao Jialin. Jialin’s two lives clash.

This novel is a delightful story about the struggle between family ties, parental expectations, professional goals, romantic loves, and personal fulfilment. The writing is sparse but evocative, revealing Jialin’s personal journey, both physically and emotionally, against the backdrop of a nation undergoing its own transformations.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- 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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