Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China

Wars and violent politics separate millions from their families, homes, and traditions. The disrupted roam the world---from the immigrant ghettoes of North America and Australia to the jungles of the Congo or the deserts of Sudan. Bearing this life involves great pain, great forebearance, and internal strength. Not everyone, especially not those who have a penchant for thinking, can stand the strain. Twentieth Century history is filled with injured wanderers and millions who fell by the wayside, couldn't make that psychological leap from stability to instability, from a known world to an unknown one. MULBERRY AND PEACH describes the orbit of one such unlucky planet, a Chinese woman who leaves home gambling on a trip to freedom from the Japanese invaders during World War II. She winds up aboard a river ship marooned on rocks in the raging Yangtze River with a disparate cast of fellow castaways. She leaves the Nationalist south for Beijing, only to be surrounded by the Communist beseigers who ultimately take the city, from which she flees south again, then to Taiwan. None of her companions fit into any new visions of the world, none have real understanding of the times. In Taiwan, she ends up hiding out in an attic for years, the wife of her Beijing lover, now turned embezzler of government funds on the lam. She has a daughter who grows up a fugitive. Eventually, the woman comes to the USA, where her complex political and sexual past catches up with her. The faceless minions of the INS are hot on her trail. Cruelty, indecision, sexual vacillation, continual separations....her endless search for self and stability cracks. She invents Peach, a second, schizophrenic persona, denying any identity with Mulberry. The book ends in mental shipwreck as it began with a physical one. I found Nieh Hualing's novel interesting due to Mulberry's slow descent into madness and schizophrenia, the intrusion of dreams, diaries, and strange visions or imaginings. The first fifty-odd pages are clearer; all subsequent chapters get murkier and more abstract, just as if a person were sliding into insanity. Very effective. Chinese literature from post-revolutionary China often deals with class struggle, anti-Communist feelings, or straightforward lives of the common people. This is an entirely different sort of Chinese novel in a very modern, strikingly written style. You may say that you couldn't follow the plot. It is not so much a plot-novel but a cry, a dream, or a trajectory into the mental pits. The amount of symbolism that a literary critic could trace here is astounding. Mirrors of mirrors with a few distorting images thrown in among them. The duality (or is it schizophrenia ?) abounds. Japanese vs. Chinese, Communist vs. Nationalist, men vs. women, tradition vs. modernity, legal vs, illegal, American vs. Chinese, reality vs. dream, written vs. spoken, on and on. Questions arise. What is it to have no home ? What is it when you are a st

The "Two Women of China" of this novel's subtitle are one and the same: Mulberry is a Chinese woman who has witnessed the major upheavals of twentieth-century China before fleeing to the United States in the 1960s, while the defiant, "Americanized" Peach is her "liberated" alterego borne of a traumatic past. Nieh presents Mulberry/Peach's story in four sections. In the first part, while China is suffering from the final attacks of the Japanese invaders at the end of World War II, Mulberry is a teenage runaway stranded with other refugees on a boat caught in the rapids of the Yangtse River. A few years later, she is trapped in Peking with her fiance and his dying mother as the Communists surround the city. In the late 1950s, Mulberry is imprisoned in an attic in Taiwan, hiding from the authorities who are seeking her husband on embezzlement charges. And, in the final section, she has emigrated to the United States, where she is being pursued by the INS and haunted by her other identity, Peach.Mulberry's plight is, at best, bleak, but Nieh manages to balance an astonishing sense of humor with the description of the calamities and isolation faced by her protagonist. Hauntingly written and beautifully translated, the novel can be read on many levels: historical and cultural allegory, political satire, a treatise on the immigrant's schizophrenic experience, a commentary on Eastern and Western sexual mores and gender identity. As a bonus, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's discerning afterword amplifies these and other themes and provides useful background for understanding the novel, but (fortunately) "Mulberry and Peach" will be immediately accessible to any reader.

This qualifies as one of the most remarkable novels I have ever read. The title character Peach, in declaring her freedom, careens on as wild and uninhibited a course as any character in literature much in contrast to her meek and terrified now subaltern Mulberry. Try to buy the version which has an afterword by the translator: read this as you're reading the novel as the comments are interesting, informative, and enlightening. The novel's form, its literary roots, its themes all evade any fixed classification--no one can lay claim to any advocacy unless it is on its plea for the individual's integrity in the face of the attempts by societies, historical forces, and governments to quantify and stratify our lives. But even that claim cannot come close to revealing the complexity and exquisite craft of the work itself. Only on a second reading do I start to discover how much a treasure of telling detail "Mulberry and Peach" is. For you analytical types, there are multiple levels of allegory threading through the work. The caveat to "not overinterpret" seems not to apply. Such compelling writing deserves to become better known, more widely read and reread, and extensively broadcast to college literature classes around the world. Let's get it back in print, and then keep it in print. Although I am given to enthusiasms, I'm not given to hyperbole--I say, this is the work of a most masterful author. Please, someone, translate more of her work!

Hua-Ling Nieh's writing is tantamount to dreaming a song/story, it does not directly appeal to the senses but rather, enters the reader's mind subconsciously. A fascinating portrayal of a woman surviving post World War II turmoil in China, it blatantly and delicately explores the impact of the cultural, lingual, political, and social upheaval that is part of revolution. Mulberry herself undergoes a complete dissociation of her 'hated', 'weaker' Chinese self and morphs into Peach, the 'liberated', 'strong' American self. A wonderful story of survival, mental illness, and cultural transplantation, something many Americans do not appreciate. Should appeal to anyone interested in Chinese or Chinese/American history, feminism, or mental illness in literature.

If you are interested in Chinese History and the Immigration experience, women on the road or a study in Skitsophrenia this book is a must. Set in China in the past and America in the 80's we stimultaneously live the similarites and jutaposition between these worlds. As we follow Mulberry and Peach's adventure and different attitudes towards a bid to stay in America, through letters to immigration officers, to each other, and recollections.The character's conversation between themselves, the letters they write and the adivce to each other, envy and disgust between Mulberry and Peach makes fascinating reading. Unfortunately this book is not widely read and ignored. In many ways, this book is as powerful as any other famous female author who writes about China and America and the stuff inbetween, if not more. Simply because it is a far more complex look into the subject. Unlike the usual recollections we get, this book is a study on issues of maddness, home, past set in a fasinating place and time. It does not try to educate readers on what it is like to be an immigrant or a woman during WWII and beyond in China. It is a true novel.