Cover Art for Educated Youth by Ye Xin. Image via Giramondo Publishing.
I had been looking forward tremendously to the English translation of Ye Xin’s 1991 book Educated Youth. It promised to explore a fascinating, hidden chapter of China’s recent history. In Mao’s China, during the cultural revolution, a class of ‘educated youth’ from the cities were sent to be re-educated by the rural workers. In their new rural contexts, many of these youths found love, got married, and had children. But when the program ended in the 70s, many of these ‘educated youths’or zhiqing immediately divorced their partners and returned alone to the city. Ye Xin’s book takes place a few years later – the children of these zhiqing are now in the teens, and a group of them come together to Shanghai to seek out their birth parents.
I had expected that this would be extremely fertile ground for explorations of family, class, politics, nationalism and loyalty. Instead, the book falls deeply into the territory of melodrama. Much of the plot is taken up with secret letters, affairs and forced drama as characters hide secrets we know must eventually come out. The gender politics of the book are laughable – the women ranked according to their beauty; the men plagued by dark desires they can’t help. Worryingly, one of the five plots of the book centres around a ‘false’ accusation of rape, the ‘hysterical’ accuser eventually admitting that she was just jealous. I don’t mean to censor the possibility of such a plot existing, but for it to be a throw-away twist in a sub-plot –addressed without complexity – is cause for concern.
It’s hard to tell how many of the problems of this book arise from translation. The prose is often dry, and leans heavily on clichés throughout. There are occasional images that intrigue, both in the streets of Shanghai and in the characters’ memories of Xishuangbanna. But ultimately, the stiff, melodramatic language kept me thoroughly outside of the human drama. And there are structural issues, too – we are following five plots, and whilst some of them come together in places, each chapter contains the same sub-headings (‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’, ‘5’) making for a reading experience that felt like colouring by numbers. The advantage, I suppose, is that any given plot can be easily avoided if it begins to annoy you more than the others.
Perhaps my hopes for this book were too high. Whilst the cultural context is intriguing, the content of these stories is ultimately about hidden secrets and betrayal. Perhaps one diagnosis would be that the book has aged very poorly. And with contemporary writers around the world writing about family and its difficulties with such wit, weight and insight – from Maxine Beneba Clarke to Junot Diaz to Banana Yoshimoto – this book pales in comparison, providing little more than an unusual context for a run-of-the-mill set of family melodramas.
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
EDUCATED YOUTH by Ye Xin
Published by Giramondo
Print ISBN : 978-1-925336-04-7
Epdf ISBN : 978-1-925336-06-1
Epub ISBN : 978-1-925336-05-4
