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"Apologies Forthcoming": Haunting Echoes of the Days When a Country Went Mad
"Apologies Forthcoming": Haunting Echoes of the Days When a Country Went Mad
Xujun Eberlein | 04 Jul 2008
It was some decade. The universities were closed. Students were at war. Poetry was banned. And the word “love,” unless applied to Mao, was expressly forbidden. Artists were denounced, and many opted for suicide. Forty years—and half a world away—mere memories of a nation’s cultural upheaval could rekindle the embers of the fanaticism and anguish that an entire generation knew as China’s Cultural Revolution.
This is the time—its madness, its passion, its complexity—that Xujun Eberlein brings so vividly to life in Apologies Forthcoming (Livingston Press/University of West Alabama), her moving collection of poignant short stories about the millions who lived during this modern reign of chaos.
Surprisingly, however, instead of mere suffering and accusation, one finds life and humanism in these stories. Love and relationships beyond romance, political struggle portrayed in an apolitical tone, the line between victims and victimizers blurred . . . This book of realistic fiction fills a major void in English literature dealing with the Cultural Revolution.
An award-winning writer who now lives in Massachusetts, Xujun (pronounced "shoe"-"June") has nothing to apologize for. Her stories are electrifying—and lyrically beautiful. “There’s a richness in her vision that sets her apart,” says Jay Parini, poet, novelist, professor, and the author of The Apprentice Lover. “Eberlein is a fresh voice in American fiction, a Chinese writer with a remarkably shrewd and interesting tongue.”
About half of Apologies Forthcoming’s stories take place during the years of the Cultural Revolution; the other half in its aftermath. The final story, “Second Encounter,” unfolds—tensely and insistently—near MIT, in the months following September 11th. It’s forty years after the worst excesses of Mao’s decade-long experiment in chaos. Wei Dong is a laid-off software programmer interviewing for a job in Boston, Massachusetts. He finds himself across a desk from the company’s chief engineer who looks at his resume and then at his face. George Zhang recognizes Wei Dong immediately. They were Red Guard fighters, barely teenagers, on opposite sides of a war between factions. In the opening story, “Snow Line,” Eberlein nicely limns the forbidden inner thoughts of a love-struck poet, in a time when the ban on poetry has just been lifted.
How many of these stories come from personal experience is hard to say. Eberlein, who lived through the Cultural Revolution’s decade as a child and teenager, had a sister who died as a Red Guard, and that event seems fictionalized in one of the stories. Eberlein also holds a PhD from MIT and worked in high-tech—which lends credence to the story that unfolds in “Second Encounter.”
Apologies Forthcoming shines a revealing light on some of the millions of people whose lives were changed forever by the ten years that turned China upside down and inside out.
With the upcoming Olympics, discord in Tibet, and China’s increasing presence on the world stage as she flexes her economic muscle, interest in this mysterious giant in the east will only grow larger. In Apologies Forthcoming, Xujun Eberlein does the great service of illuminating the interior lives of a peculiar generation, many of whom are now leading China’s phenomenal awakening.
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For more information, visit:
www.xujuneberlein.com (web page) and www.insideoutchina.com (blog)
Author: Xujun Eberlein
Title: Apologies Forthcoming
Publisher: Livingston Press/University of West Alabama
Publication date: June, 2008
Library edition, ISBN 978-1-60489-006-8, $26.00
Trade paper, ISBN 978-1-60489-007-5, $15.95
144 pages, 6” x 9”
Distributed by Ingram, Baker and Taylor, Brodart, Blackwell North America, Ambassador Book Service, Yankee Book Peddler, Midwest Library Services, Coutt’s Library Services, and others
Biography
Xujun Eberlein grew up in Chongqing, China, and moved to the United States in the summer of 1988. After receiving a PhD from MIT in the spring of 1995, and winning an award for her dissertation, she joined a small but ambitious high tech company. On Thanksgiving 2003, she gave up tech for writing. She has since won a number of literary awards. Her stories and personal essays have been published in the United States, Canada, England, Kenya, and Hong Kong, in magazines such as AGNI, Walrus, Michigan Quarterly Review, PRISM International, StoryQuarterly, Stand, and Kwani. Her debut story
collection Apologies Forthcoming won the 2007 Tartt Fiction Award. She was recently awarded an artist fellowship in fiction/creative nonfiction by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She hosts the literary and cultural blog “Inside-out China.”
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