Today in China the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square are a taboo subject. They’re not taught in textbooks or memorialized in museums. Many young people don’t even know about the “June 4th incident,” as it’s referred to in China, “if it’s referred to at all,” according to journalist Louisa Lim in her 2014 book The People’s Republic of Amnesia.
This “collective amnesia” inspired writer, translator, and musician Fiona Sze-Lorrain to write about Tiananmen and other bloody episodes in modern Chinese history in her debut novel-in-stories Dear Chrysanthemums. “Just in 30 years, everything was just gone,” she said of Tiananmen in an interview in Asian Books Blog. The characters of her story “The Invisible Window” share her distress. Three former student protestors now in exile in France, they meet on the anniversary of June 4th and lament the way that night has become a “folktale: selectively forgotten and forgiven when cash, comfort, technology are within reach,” as one of the women says. “We need the mainstream audience to understand and never forget,” another woman says. Through the stories in Dear Chrysanthemums, Sze-Lorrain attempts to make readers understand and remember not just Tiananmen, but also the civil war of the 1940s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. She does this by telling stories of ordinary women linked through blood, love, and friendship, with each story set in a year ending in the number six, starting in 1946 and ending in 2016. By choosing to set many of the stories in the aftermath, Sze-Lorrain shows that there is no clean line between history and the present. “Nothing’s changed in China,” as one character says.
Sze-Lorrain, a classically trained pianist and gifted guzheng player, brings her attentiveness to sound and rhythm to her prose. “The brush must turn inward once it touches rice paper. Hide its tip to temper the opening. To amend the fall. To move the ink across a page with an untamed brush,” the book opens, in a one-page apostrophe addressing her calligraphy brush or pen, calling on their help to make her writing “[appear] steady and more or less alive.”
The book’s settings and characters do feel very much alive, thanks to Sze-Lorrain’s attention to concrete detail. In “Death at the Wukang Mansion,” set shortly after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Ling, a former dancer, is sent to the Wukang Mansion in Shanghai as punishment for her adultery. Ling has long dreamed of living in the mansion because of the building’s “illustrious history” as the former home of “affluent foreigners during the twenties, and later, during the last Republican years, some of the most celebrated film and entertainment luminaries, patrons, and literati of Big Shanghai.” The mansion was once a “lofty eight story building” that boasted “arcades, spiral stairways, intricately tiled walls, vaults, elevators, modern facilities, Art Deco features.” But when Ling arrives in 1966, the halls are “cramped with pots and pans, piles of newspapers, and chaotic columns of cardboard boxes,” and “singlets, blouses, and pants” dry on “racks and wires that zigzagged haphazardly across one another in midair.” The building smells of “charcoal, leek, and damp bricks.” The decay of the building, once the home of artists like Ling herself, foreshadows her own demise. A coffin that mysteriously arrives every morning—sometimes with a body in it—and is taken away every evening by Red Guards creates a sense of dread, particularly because the coffin is “without a lid.” Death, something usually hidden away, is out in the open.
Sze-Lorrain applies this same close attention to objects as she does to her characters. Here is Little Green, personal helper to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of President Chiang Kai-shek, recalling Chang’er, an eighteen-year-old girl who becomes Madame’s cook, as she looked on the day of her job interview in 1946: “In a blue padded robe, with a small tattered brown suitcase beside her, she waved to me. . . . I was close enough to catch a glimpse of her tall silhouette, but not her face and short bangs and I mistook her luggage for a dog.” This description is detailed enough that we can picture Chang’er, but not so precise as to be unbelievable that Little Green would recall this twenty years later. The detail of her mistaking the suitcase for a dog also captures how she felt and still feels toward Chang’er all these years later: maternal, with Chang’er, like a dog, as someone who needs looking after. Over the course of the story, we come to understand why she feels this way about Chang’er, why the young girl’s beloved husband is missing, and why she has that “brown sickle scar on her right forearm . . . slanted across her skin like an implanted piece of rope.” The “sickle,” of course, brings to mind the hammer and sickle of the Chinese Communist Party, hinting at the source of this scar, a conflict between the Communists and Chang’er and her husband, whom the Communists describe as “counterrevolutionaries.”
Details like these brought me close to these characters, but often, just as I was getting to know them, the story suddenly ended—just as the conflict was beginning to build. This is not to say that nothing happens in the stories—the characters experience murder, rape, accidental death—but that these actions don’t always feel causal or consequential, leaving the reader with little sense of how the characters have been changed. That these stories challenge classic story structure isn’t surprising; one character expresses disdain for plot: “conflict, climax, resolution. Simple.” Real life has drama, conflict, and tension, they note, but no resolution. In “Green,” the title narrator writes, “Every storyteller knows when to omit the backstory, how to mend the foggy in-betweens.” Often, Sze-Lorrain omits a character’s backstory entirely. In “Death at the Wukang Mansion,” the reader learns hardly anything about who Ling is and what has brought her to the mansion until the middle of her final scene. If we were to know, earlier in the story, that prior to arriving at the Wukang Mansion Ling had been subjected to “purge sessions” as punishment for her infidelity with another woman, we might feel greater tension when the Red Guards parade in and out of the building, singing refrains from The Red Detachment of Women about “how deep the hatred of women runs.”
The variety of Sze-Lorrain’s approaches makes the collection feel dynamic. She switches between the first and third person, between short and long time frames, and experiments with form. In “Green,” which spans twenty years, the narrator recalls her days working for Madame Chiang Kai-shek after Green is accused of having Nationalist and capitalist sympathies. “The Invisible Window,” in contrast, unfolds over the course of a single conversation and consists almost entirely of dialogue. “Back to Beijing” is an epistolary story, in which Ai, a Chinese woman exiled to Paris after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, writes to her twin sister whom she left behind. This variety of forms and approaches allows the reader to experience key moments in modern Chinese history as they unfold, while also appreciating these events’ lasting impacts in the present.
The two stories featuring characters who participated in the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square both take place decades later, in 2016, and thus, the stories are not about the events of 1989 themselves so much as their aftereffects. These women have not been allowed to remember what happened to them in the spring of 1989: the seven weeks of protests calling for greater political and economic freedoms, and the Chinese government’s subsequent violent crackdown on June 4. They have been told that only two hundred protesters were killed that night, when they are certain the figure was much higher (some sources put the figure around 2,600). “They must imagine us fools,” one says. The gaslighting and silence around Tiananmen has kept these women from healing and has taken a major toll on their mental health. Two decades after Ai flees to Paris, she develops Parkinson’s. Sze-Lorrain suggests a connection between Ai’s trauma and her disease when Ai mentions an article by an American poet that claims internalized stress and trauma make people more susceptible to Parkinson’s.
Sze-Lorrain’s stories point to a way to cope with trauma: making art. Most of the characters are artists of some kind—specifically musicians—and while their art is often the source of their trauma, it is also their way of coping with it. After her husband’s disappearance, Chang’er plays piano: “Music consoled her during her grief and pregnancy. . . . The piano was a womb that had protected both mother and daughter.” She passes a love of piano on to her daughter Willow, for whom music is both a source of trauma and its salve. When Chang’er sends Willow her old white piano, one of the movers sexually assaults Willow. In the wake of the assault, she plays Bach, Brahms, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. About the sound of the piano, Sze-Lorrain writes: “She could smell the perfume of each note and the shape of it as if it were a pearl.”
But in order to heal from trauma, these characters must do more than play music. They must tell their stories. In “Dear Chrysanthemums,” Mei, the daughter of a famous guzheng player and teacher and a famous guzheng player herself, is sent during the Cultural Revolution to perform reform labor—plucking chrysanthemums for six years under brutal conditions. She is punished for her music, but music is also what saves her. In 1972, she is plucked from the fields and brought to Beijing to play the guzheng for President Nixon. Despite her acclaimed performance, her father is still humiliated and killed by the Red Guards, and she moves to New York, where she teaches guzheng. “If not for music, our guzheng tradition, I too might have taken my own life,” she says. Compared to the other characters in these stories, Mei is the most open about her trauma. To remember the past and to heal from it, Sze-Lorrain suggests, requires that we make music and art and that we tell our stories, as Mei does, “without a trace of regret.”
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Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories. By Fiona Sze-Lorrain. New York: Scribner, 2023. 176 pp. $18.00.
