Mulberry and Peach
Two Women of China
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
This extraordinary novel, winner of a 1990 American Book Award, recounts the story of two women—Mulberry and Peach—who are really one. Mulberry is a young woman who has fled the turmoil of postwar China to settle in the United States. Unable to forget the terrors she has witnessed or resolve the conflicts between her new life and her old, she develops a second personality: fearless, tough-talking, sexually uninhibited, Peach. While Mulberry clings to her cultural and ethical roots, Peach renounces her past to embrace the American way of life with a vengeance.
Brilliantly innovative in style, Mulberry and Peach offers a rare women's perspective on the upheavals of modern China, and presents an unforgettable portrait of the pain of cultural dislocation and the anguish of psychological disintegration.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first fiction to be published in the U.S., the director of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program presents a disquieting study of psychological and cultural schizophrenia. Mulberry, a teenager who grows to adulthood in China during the '40s and '50s, develops a wanton alter ego, Peach. Cutting between Mulberry's old journals and letters that Peach, traveling across the U.S., sends to the immigration official investigating her, the novel provocatively juxtaposes events from American history with China's upheavals; modern ways destroy the past, but do not liberate Mulberry from it. The author's insights about guilt and the ways in which we are trapped in our own lives are perceptive and powerfulMulberry, in hiding, tells her daughter that the people at liberty outside ``can't go wherever they want to, either . . . . The earth is a huge attic. The huge attic is divided into millions of little attics, just like ours.'' But with reductive statements at the beginning of each chapter explaining the characters' symbolic roles, wooden dialogue and often flat writing, this novel and its heroine fail to spark the reader's emotions.
