Yan LiankeThree Brothers: Memories of My Family by Carlos Rojas

Abstract

church, superstition, and even quotes from the most famous Roma poet, about whom Reviati gives us a lovely coda in “The Story of Papuzsa,” a welcome thirty-five-page addendum. The young men achieve manhood in various guises, some successful, some less so, and each has become a fully rounded character. Ultimately, Reviati delivers a penetrating view of the vicissitudes of developing into an adult in a world that is fraught with generations of mistrust, anger, and poverty and yet is suffused with the vibrant enchantment of being human. Rita D. Jacobs New York Yan Lianke Three Brothers: Memories of My Family Trans. Carlos Rojas. New York. Grove Press. 2020. 209 pages. YAN LIANKE’S Three Brothers: Memories of My Family is a powerful portrait of the trials of daily life in Song County, Henan Province, in the 1960s and 1970s. The memoir not only provides a deeply heartfelt account of his big family—including his father, his uncles, and his cousins—but also offers a philosophical meditation on dignity, duty, death, and the bond of a rural Chinese family. Yan’s father set his mind on fashioning the tile-roofed house that would serve as Yan’s brothers’ bridal “mansions.” Thus, he overworked day and night in spite of his declining health, which resulted in his early death at the age of fifty-eight. In order to break away from country life, Yan’s first uncle sent his most-loved son into the army, but he was abused by the commander and hanged himself in consequence. Yan’s first uncle was heartbroken, indulging himself in gambling to waste his remaining life. Yan’s fourth uncle, who was fortunate to have escaped the harshness of rural life by working in a cement factory, became a “bowedhead ”—half-urban and half-rural—and was looked down upon by city people. After retirement, he came back to his hometown, only to find that he was isolated from country people. The memoir is the chronicle of a family as well as a record of history—in case the younger generations tend to forget. It does not mean to “bash the government”; however , it did skate over historical events such as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution , and the Three-year Natural Disaster, during which period millions of people starved to death (“the revolution does not produce grain, only political fervor”). The social injustice and inequality between city and country is touched upon throughout the chapters of the book, and the most Three White Horses: “Truth tastes like ashes in my mouth / as I sit in the deep gray light.” Often individual poems are untitled or are identified by the first line of the poem. This stylistic choice creates a chain in which one poem links to preceding poems and anticipates a succeeding poem. Such a pattern is evident in Red Stones (a collaborative project with Steven Schroeder’s artwork): “the wind stirs under the back stairs, / drifts across a transparent dark / where nothing begins, nothing ends.” The successive linkage of poems renders a cumulative effect, the power of observation gaining as each poem, along with the combined, collective context containing the individual poems, moves to completion. Many of his works move in such a cumulative procession, and reading them as such obviously establishes their fullest effect. Interestingly, however, almost any of the individual parts of a poem or a stanza from one of Zdanys’s books may also be read in random order with satisfying results. His cumulative style reinforces the lyrical power felt throughout this collection . Consider these haunting images from St. Brigid’s Well (one passage from a continuous , single-volume poem consisting of fifty-nine stanzas): “The red shaft of water shudders in the wake. / Midnight blooms in the west. I am closed and pale, whiter than stars / whelmed at the stroke, part of the fragile / patterns and urgent movements caught / in the undertows of the town.” Perhaps my favorite of Zdanys’s books is The Kingfisher’s Reign. Originally published as a collection of prose poems (they are set in verse in this volume), The Kingfisher’s Reign features a narrative voice that organizes around a collection of...