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Overview
A powerful story of one woman's displacement between cultures and traditions—a landmark in Asian-American literature.When it was first published in America in 1968, Chuang Hua's evocative novel Crossings was completely unheralded and quickly went out of print. Years later it would be widely recognized as the first modernist novel to address the Asian-American experience, its deeply imagistic prose—marked by spatial and temporal leaps, an unconventional syntax, and unanticipated shifts in plot—as haunting as the writing of Jane Bowles.
At the center of Crossings is Fourth Jane, the fourth of seven children whose recollections of an oppressive yet loving father, Dyadya, are collaged with her constant migrations between four continents. Suffering from a domestic torpor occasionally enlivened by ritualistic preparations of food for her foreign lover, Jane's displacement only heightens the remembrance of what she has fled: a breech of the familial code; a failed romance; and further in the past, the desolation of war as "bloated corpses flowed in the current of the yellow river." Spare, lyrical, Taoist in form and elusiveness, visually cinematic, tender and sensual, Chuang Hua's powerful narrative endures as one of the most moving and original works of literature in the history of American letters.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Hua's classic modernist novel from 1968 threads together the births, deaths, marriages, breakups and global relocations of an upper middle class Chinese-American family. The narrative focuses largely on the dreams and recollections of the middle daughter, Fourth Jane (birth order precedes one's name in familial address), as breaks with tradition undermine the family's cohesiveness. Firstborn son Fifth James, for one, flouts his father's orders and returns from the army with a non-Chinese bride in tow, while Jane moves to Paris despite her father's entreaties to stay. Hua, the pen name of Stella Yang Copley (1931-2000), writes in a muscular, free, indirect style ("Dyadya sat in his study and composed a letter. Dear James we are going to the Far East...") that beautifully captures personal and cultural contradictions and conflicts. The strongest plot line tracks Jane's affair with a foreign journalist, but even this frequently dissolves into ambiguities and fragments. Work, here, is a balm for the disorientation Jane feels: on several occasions, Jane deals with insomnia by preparing elaborate meals for her lover, just as her mother later copes with grief by meticulously cleaning the house. This new edition of the reclusive writer's only known work will help bring Hua's novel the readership it deserves. (June)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
Released in 1968, this is among the earliest-if not the first-modernist novels to tackle the Asian American experience. Like the author, protagonist Fourth Jane (she's the fourth of seven kids) bangs around the globe, eventually landing in the United States.
—Michael Rogers