Jie Zhang (1) (1937–2022)

This isn't one of those books I'd tell all my friends to read but it was a very good read for me. The writing is fine, not astonishing (hard to know what's been lost in translation) but the combination of politics, marriage, life of women during a period when China was trying to rapidly industrialize and develop was surprisingly compelling.

Many Characters and Few Descriptions

Zhang Jie's "Leaden Wings" (sometimes translated as "Heavy Wings") is a difficult read because of the numerous characters and the lack of traditional narrative. It makes up for it by being the first novel I read that was written contemporaneously with the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Virago's copy of the book, with a beautiful painting of a factory on the cover, includes a list of characters before the novel begins. This is a helpful resource, but show more sometimes I found myself looking up two or three characters on a page. Several names were similar and I became confused. The author or the translator also mixed given names with westernized translations of the names. I love Chinese literature and am accustomed to the names, but this was just a bit too much for me.

There is no traditional western narrative with an exposition, climax, and resolution. Instead, each chapter looks at how different characters interact with each other. This threw me off because I expected to hear from characters introduced in earlier chapters, such as the orphaned young man who lived with a journalist, but they appeared only sparingly in later chapters.

Instead of a typical plot structure, we have an ongoing conflict: reformers versus Maoists. Both groups are cliquish and disagreements flow from those groups. Tension is shown by one clique speaking to a members of the same clique, such as the young factory workers celebrating a bonus who reveal their thoughts to an older reformer who they don't know is actually a minister in charge of the factory. Zhang Jie's descriptions and personal thoughts about this are very transparent. There are several criticisms of the party structure in China, with non-party members being overlooked or scorned by party-members. There is no subtlety here. While that might make for poor literature, it was no doubt refreshing and insightful for many readers at the time.

There are several positives to this book, however. It is one of only a handful of novels written in the late '70's and early '80's that have been translated. That alone makes the book truly valuable. In addition, the not-so-subtle jabs at the old-liners certainly were brave moves by Zhang Jie. The book also features prominent female characters, including a muckraking but quiet journalist, a poorly-treated widow, and a vacuous wife of an official. All of these characters deserve further treatment, however.

Although I only give this book two stars on account of its' literary merits, I recognize that the book is very important. Students of Chinese reformist history and fans of Chinese literature will find that this book fills a very empty hole. show less

In this book I found two great stories.
The first one is about a daughter that is having doubts if she should marry her fiancee of two years. He is so very quiet.... When her mother dies, she finds a kind of diary that her mother wrote to the man she loved. She wanted this diary to be cremated together with her, but according to the daughter is was too interesting to do that.
When reading it, she starts to understand her mother better, how she has felt all these years when she was show more experiencing an impossible love. All the things her mother never spoke of, she now reads in this diary and that changes how she looks at her mother.
It also gives her ideas on how to proceed with her own questions, but the outcome of that is not told.
A very strong portrait of an impossible love.

The second part is about a different kind of love. Two women who (have) love(d) the same man. One was loved by him when he was younger and she saved him on several occasions. She also gave birth to his child (and lost it when the boy was 15). Since that was highly uncommon in China, she had very hard years when the boy was small. The other woman married him and lived in wealth with him. They have a son together, who doesn't live at home anymore. She still tries her best to save him, make live easy for him. Now she has found him a job that will last him the few years that he still has to work intill his retirement. BUT in that job he'll have to work closely together with the woman he wanted to marry first... Despite she has grown over him, I can imagine that this triangle can be very uneasy for all of them. Too bad the book has only 157 pages. I would have read much more!
If you can find an edition in English, I strongly recommend! show less

First published in 1980, "Leaden Wings" is the story of the attempts by the Ministry of Heavy Industry to modernise Chinese factories. Zhang Jie was divorced when she wrote this novel, and as well as being a satire on Chinese industry, her female characters show the contradictions between being able to get good jobs and rise to high political rank, while their personal lives are constrained by the remnants of the feudal social system. This theme ties in very nicely with "The Good Women of show more China", which I read recently.

The female characters are mostly rather negative, so Virago's afterward (which seems to be apologising for publishing it) is at pains to explain that Chinese women face different challenges from Western women. I preferred the other introduction, written by the translator Gladys Yang, who was brought up in in China, was the first undergraduate ever to study Chinese at Oxford, married a Chinese man and was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, so she really understood what the author was trying to convey. show less