Foreign Devil

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Wang Ping's praised first collection of interlocked short stories, American Visa, featured a heroine, Seaweed, whose background resembled that of the protagonist of this strong and provocativeand obviously equally autobiographicalnovel. Like Seaweed, Ni Bing grows up during the Cultural Revolution and its equally horrifying aftermath, as the daughter of a naval officer and a harsh, abusive mother who uses her as a virtual slave for household chores. Like Seaweed, Ni Bing is determined to escape her family and to acquire a college education. Given nicknames like "foreign devil" and "little ghost," she endures hardships and privations both in her family home, on a fishing island off the Chinese coast, and in a rural "reeducation'' village. From the time she is five years old, Ni Bing is plagued by her knowledge that there is a secret surrounding her birth. Her hard life in the village of Ma Ao, where she lives from the ages of 15 to 22, exposes her to the repressive Communist Party machinery. As her comrades are victimized by the cruelty and injustice of the campaign to eradicate enemies of the state, Ni Bing practices self-preservation and learns to hide her anguish. As she exists on an emotional tightrope of fear and anxiety, it is perhaps inevitable that she will lose her virginity to a married man who makes her feel needed. Meanwhile, the mystery of her identity and of her parents' volatile behaviorboth send her mixed signals of hatred and lovecontinues to weigh on her mind until, finally, knowledge sets her free. While Wang portrays Ni Bing's emotional torment with moving insight, she sometimes tries the reader's patience with awkward flashbacks. But the scenes depicting the brutality of China's repressive society are as searing as those in Anchee Min's Red Azalea, and Ping writes with compelling candor about an authoritative regime where the experiences of victim and torturer are often interchangeable. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Shanghai-born Wang Ping's first novel relies on a first-person narrator, like her short story collection American Visa (Coffee House Pr., 1994). Here, Ni Bing details her 12-year struggle to earn a college degree in China and study abroad. Reminiscent of critical, nonfictional accounts like Heng Liang's Son of the Revolution (LJ 2/15/83), the novel presents China at its worst. Even without focusing on arduous interactions with the "Party," Ni Bing's story would be a wonderful narrative, showing as it does her indomitable spirit in the face of abusive treatment from her family and male companion. A few transitions between past and present are abrupt and momentarily confusing but do not detract from the novel's intensity. For literary collections.Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon, Eugene # #+ |0395785901 Wideman, John Edgar. The Cattle Killing. Houghton. Oct. 1996. 212p. ISBN 0-395-78590-1. $22.95. ~ As Europeans encroach, the Xhosa seek desperately to ward them off by flying against all reason and slaughtering their cattle. Across the ocean, in a 18th-century Philadelphia wracked with plague and racial uncertainty, a young black preacher follows an African woman carrying a dead white child to the edge of a lake and watches them disappear, leaving him to wonder forever whether the woman was preparing her charge for burial or drowning herselg. Later, nearly frozen to death in a freak storm, he is brought back to life by a couplehe is black, she is whitewho crawl naked into bed with him to warm him slowly. Wideman here strings arresting images like these on the thinnest thread of a plot, and the result fails as a novel but succeeds as a brilliant literary tour de force. Moving beyond the grittiness of earlier works (e.g. Fever, LJ 11/1/89), he has created something wonderfully meditative, even rhapsodic. Patient readers will love it. Recommended for most collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/96.]Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Kirkus Reviews

Chinese poet and storywriter Wang (American Visa, 1994), based in the US since 1985, offers a vivid if overstuffed debut novel of life and love in Red China.

Ni Bing has been different right from birth, different in ways that only increase as she grows older and must choose between being "a Party member" or a "foreign devil"—that is, someone who associates with foreigners and has foreign ideas. By the time Ni Bing makes that choice, however, she has lost all her faith in Mao and the Party. As a child she saw her mother, a talented dancer and teacher, publicly humiliated during the Cultural Revolution; as a teenager, she innocently got a young man into trouble with the authorities; and to atone she worked long hours in the fields before going to a teacher's training college, the only place she was allowed to apply. There, she was made to guard a desperately ill teacher who was being forced to "confess" her political errors. These political memories alternate with memories, some frightening and initially inexplicable, of her childhood. Both her mother and her paternal grandmother were unusually demanding, and Ni Bing felt close only to her father, a naval officer. Then, at the teachers' college, she meets Van, an older student who seduces her, promising that they will live together in America; but though he helps her get into a proper university, he soon proves to be selfish and domineering. Events move at a dizzying and sometimes barely credible pace, as Van's American cousin promises, and delivers, her a place in a US college. The new China is a lot like the old, though, and before she can leave, Ni Bing (who seems at times more a symbol than a character) must endure bureaucratic obstruction and corruption that would deter all but the toughest.

A litany of horrors faced down by a true-grit heroine, narrated in a fashion too hectic, cool, and distant to be affecting.