Mao's Town

REVIEW:

This is an important book. A story of life and death, fire and water. It has grit and horror with a terrifyingring of authenticity. It may be fiction but it illuminates a section of history that the world has misunderstoodfor too long. At school in 1961, I heard there were people starving in China, but I had no idea whatthat really meant, until I read Mao’s Town.The story reminds us that nations will not be repressed forever, that the “meek will inherit the earth” inthe end. It is a story of the battle for human dignity. Peaceful characters endure horrific violence and humiliation,but in the end they conquer, with no weapons but their own courage and willingness to makeultimate sacrifice.The child narrator has the perfect voice, innocent, curious, compassionate, and even funny, as he weaveshis slippery way back and forth between scenes of immense cruelty, offset by human kindness and courage.Clearly, this is no sweet fairy-tale. Yet, it also manages to somehow transport us into the lyrical world of theChinese willow painting, complete with willow tree, singing birds, bridge over winding river and charactersfrom both humanity and the natural world.This fiction is the perfect way to depict the dreadful realities of the Chinese famine of the early sixties,when tens of millions died. It sent me scurrying straight to the encyclopaedias to learn more and I soondiscovered that the world shown in Mao’s Town is nothing short of blindingly honest. If anything, it isconservative in its depiction of the horrors of its setting. And yet, however bad starvation may be, there isfar more to this story than that.No encyclopaedia can bring history to life so vividly as fiction of this quality can. Here we can live it directly,but only because the author has drawn his characters so deftly, so sensitively, that we cannot helpbut identify. We laugh, cry, starve, kill, love, live and die, right there beside them, until they are all burnedindelibly across our brains.The story has a perfect shape, with a skilfully slow reveal, building gradually to a fiery climax and the windingdown at last to a gentle and satisfying ending.This may be one of the most important stories to arise in many decades. Every school and university should include it in the curriculum.