Book extract: ‘Three Brothers’ by Yan Lianke (translated by Carlos Rojas)
Book extract: ‘Three Brothers’ by Yan Lianke (translated by Carlos Rojas)
04 March 2020
Asia House is pleased to bring you an extract from Three Brothers, the latest piece of work by the three-time International Booker Prize nominee Chinese author Yan Lianke.
Due to be published in the UK tomorrow (5 March 2020), Three Brothers paints a richly detailed portrait of rural China during the Cultural Revolution. In his first work of non-fiction, ‘one of the masters of modern Chinese literature’ (Jung Chang) brings readers into his boyhood home in Song Country, Henan Province, chronicling the lives of his father and two uncles, as well as his own. Three Brothers is a celebration of the power of one family to hold together in the most punishing of circumstances. Sharply alive to the cyclical nature of history, and the power of familial guilt, it also shows how the pen can be a route to freedom.
If you can’t wait until tomorrow, here’s a short extract from the book to wet your appetites.
In an instant, I finally understood that the function of all the toil and hardship, misfortune and kindness my father’s generation experienced had been to permit them to continue living, to help them secure daily necessities, and to prepare them for the inevitable processes of aging, disease, and death.
On October 1, 2007, as our country was celebrating the National Day holiday, with happiness inundating cities and towns like a raging flood, I received several phone calls urging me to return to my hometown as quickly as possible, as my sixty-nine-year-old Fourth Uncle had abruptly left this world. Hurrying back from Beijing to Song county in Henan province, I realized with a shock that of the four men in my father’s generation—which included three brothers and a cousin—all three brothers had now departed this world, seeking peace and tranquillity in another realm.
In the middle of the following night, I knelt down in front of a white spirit tent, keeping vigil over Fourth Uncle’s coffin. Outside, the moon was bright and the stars were sparse. There was only a light breeze and the trees were still. The entire village seemed to have stopped breathing in response to Fourth Uncle’s death. In the ensuing stillness, one of my sisters went up to the coffin to replace an incense stick that had burned down. When she returned, she said, with some embarrassment, “Brother Lianke, you’ve written so many books, why don’t you write one about our family?” She said, “Our father’s generation have now all passed away. Why don’t you write about the three brothers?” She said, “You can also write about yourself—about your youth.” I didn’t immediately respond. Originally I had felt that my writing was completely unrelated to my family and had no relevance to this corner of the world. But at that moment, I happened to be feeling particularly unhappy, hopeless, and confused about my writing. So I decided I absolutely should write something for them—for my father’s generation as well as my siblings and cousins. It didn’t matter if I wrote neither a lot nor particularly well, as long as they knew that I had written something. So I began examining the life and fate of my father’s generation, revisiting my childhood and youth, and researching the historical traces of that period. Finally, I had an epiphany and realized that the function of all the toil and hardship, misfortune and kindness my father’s generation experienced had been to permit them to continue living; to help them secure daily necessities like kindling, rice, oil, and salt; and to prepare them for the inevitable processes of aging, disease, and death. I pondered this for a long time, and ultimately decided to write about how they had lived their lives and how they had confronted death.
Three Brothers is published by Chatto & Windus on 5 March 2020. Find out more and buy the book here.
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