Tags
bipoc, China, Chinese history, family, historical fiction, multi-generational story, Taiwan, US history
Melissa Fu’s Peach Blossom Spring is a multi-generational family tale that tells the story of Dao Meilin; her son, Renshu (also known as Henry in America); and Henry’s daughter, Lily. It starts in 1938 as Meilin and Renshu flee their village in China ahead of the advancing Japanese army and make their way to a new life in Taiwan and ends up exploring Henry and Lily’s lives in America, as Lily is desperate to learn about her heritage and identity while Henry can’t bear to share the stories of his life with her. Connecting it all is a scroll containing ancient Chinese stories that both bind the family and pulls against those family ties through out each of Meilin, Henry, and Lily’s lives.
Peach Blossom Spring is a lyrical, beautiful novel rooted in Chinese culture that wrestles with China’s 20th century history of invasion and control, from the Japanese to the Communist Party. Each chapter is segmented by time and place with headings grounding the reader in where and when we are in Meilin and Renshu’s story. Time moves fast, and Meilin and Renshu move frequently across mainland China before settling in Taiwan. However, the narrative still feels balanced and full without feeling too sparse, overstuffed, or glossed over due to the jumps in location and time.
Fu writes with such love and care, creating space for us to really get to know her characters as people. The narrative perspective flows back and forth between Meilin and Renshu (and later Lily) with ease and subtlety. Fu does not treat either of them as just stand-ins to represent the context in which they are living. Rather, she allows for that historical and cultural context to impact, change, and guide their behaviors and actions over the course of their lives in believable and sometimes heartbreaking ways while ensuring that we readers see them as individuals within that larger context. The novel is inspired by Fu’s own family history, and she takes her role as custodian and interpreter of both her family’s experiences and the larger history of China very seriously.
For me, the book flags just a bit when Lily joins the narrative perspectives in the last third of the book. Her sections feel lighter, slighter, and faster, as if the story has detached from its strong grounding and is now skimming along the narrative surface. The dialogue becomes clunkier, too, especially when Lily converses with her work colleagues in the last bit of the book. However, it is fun to kick around Houston while Lily is attending Rice University, and I enjoyed the many nods to places and things in a city I know well. I also wondered how much of those details would meaningfully build place for readers who don’t know Houston well, as it seems like Fu relies more on these “name drops” in creating the city than she does for other prominent settings in the novel. It almost felt like she didn’t quite feel confident enough to conjure Houston without them, which seemed strange because she does such a thoughtful and beautiful job creating a strong sense of place for every part of China and Taiwan that Meilin and Renshu go to, as well as Evanston, Illinois (another place I know well) and northern New Mexico, key locations for Renshu/Henry in his American life. That being said, it was also nice to be reminded of how Houston was during that time period.
Overall, I really loved this beautiful peach blossom of a book. Quiet and thoughtful yet bursting with evocative descriptions of smells, places, and human experience, it’s a multi-generational saga that shines light on China and Taiwan’s fraught histories, the unique facets of the immigrant and inter-racial experiences in the United States, and the universal yet complex nuances of family love. Peach Blossom Spring is absolutely worth spending time with.