Flowers for Mei-Ling
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Chinese by birth, Eurasian by blood, Mei-Ling Wang's extraordinary life is a mirror of our time. Born in China in 1949, the year of the Red Army's entry into Beijing, she is the daughter of an English mother and Chinese father who share the Communist vision of a more perfect future. Mei-ling grows to womanhood amid the violent passions and numbing brutality unleashed by the Cultural Revolution. In 1968, as a tidal wave of political turmoil engulfs the globe, Mei-Ling, penniless, is forced to flee her homeland. She embarks on an odyssey that carries her from China to Hong Kong to Europe to North America. Beautiful and intelligent, compelled by necessity and desire, Mei-Ling threads her way carefully among the men who love her and use her. She discovers the power of sex and the lure of wealth; she mastered the art of survival. When she returns to Hong Kong and China in 1997, the colony and the mainland are about to become one country again. The People's Republic and the daughter who was forced to flee its shores so long before have been tempered by their struggles and stripped of their illusions. They are wealthy and strong. But they have been forced to relinquish the ideals that first brought them into being. Flowers for Mei-Ling is an epic story that propels the reader through fifty years of tumultuous events. With this panoramic first novel, Lorraine Lochs joins that company of ambitious novelists who explore both public affairs and private passions with understanding and conviction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers who like a multicharactered story with international settings and a reprise of pivotal moments of 20th-century history will appreciate Lach's engrossing debut novel. In the intriguing opening chapter, a widowed Canadian banker who travels to Amsterdam for an assignation meets Mei-Ling Wang, a high-class call girl. In addition to being beautiful, Mei-Ling is well-bred, intelligent and knowledgeable in the creative arts. Flashbacks to 1968 China reveal the trauma in Mei-Ling's life: sent with other Red Guards into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, she was the victim of a gang rape en route. Finally reunited with her English-born mother, who was once an idealistic Communist, as was her Chinese father (a professor), Mei-Ling is determined never to be powerless again. Her pragmatic decision to cooperate in her seduction by an unscrupulous Dutchman allows her to achieve financial security; but she is further disillusioned when she is pressed into service in his sex-for-hire business. Meanwhile, in other parts of the globe, people whose lives will mesh with Mei-Ling's are participating in or being affected by the revolutionary spirit of the times: notably an anti-Vietnam War protester in Chicago who flees to Canada. Lachs seems determined to touch on the major political upheavals of the last 50 years, and when her characters describe those events the narrative becomes didactic. But her insights into generational reactions--children of idealists become cynics, and the next generation swings back--are perceptive, and give an otherwise conventional story a deeper dimension.