Bittersweet - Hardcover

Li, Leslie

4.14

77 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804817774 ISBN 13: 9780804817776

Publisher: Tuttle Pub, 1992

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Bittersweet is a compelling first novel about love, war, family and one woman's life of great hardship and even greater triumph.
From the last days of the warlords to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square, it is in essence the 100-year odyssey of Bittersweet, a headstrong peasant woman who rises from poverty and endures abandonment, patriarchy, and revolution as the wife of the second most powerful man in China. This gripping story was inspired by the lives of the author's grandfather, the first democratically elected Vice President of China and subsequently acting president, and her grandmother, a woman you won't soon forget.
Unmarried at nineteen and tormented by her jealous sister-in-law, Bittersweet defies custom and arranges her own marriage to an officer in China's newly formed republican army, whose favorable destiny, a soothsayer insists, matches Bittersweet's own. As her husband Delin's star rises with victory in battle, Bittersweet's star ascends along with it, and when she gives birth to their son her position is assured.
But while her husband fights enemies on the battlefield, and the deception of his envious commander-in-chief, Chiang Kai-shek, uncertainty of a different stripe intrudes upon Bittersweet's already unsettled life in the form of Dejie, her husband's beautiful and arrogant concubine. By skillfully employing the very rules that men have devised to justify their own privileges, Bittersweet gains authority while remaining the picture of a dutiful and obedient wife. She has a single ambition - to see her family safe and together again.
Masterfully written in a subtle yet engaging style, this epic story will hold you spellbound from beginning to end.

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From AudioFile:

Bittersweet, a strong-willed peasant woman, escapes infanticide to become the wife of the second-most powerful man in China. This fictionalized biography of Leslie Li's grandmother is fascinating history and a window into the soul of China. In a voice distinct with delicate nuances, Linda Stephens flawlessly plays all parts of this one-hundred-year epic. Marshaling us through the Chinese names with ease and authority, Stephens compels us first with the power of Bittersweet's early life and then with the poignant ironies of her later life. An afterword spoken by the author herself explains the novel's genesis. P.E.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews:

A panoramic whirl through Chinese history in a first novel inspired by a Chinese grandmother who was granted that most ambiguous of wishes--to live in interesting times. A granddaughter of the first democratically elected vice- president of China, Li takes her family's remarkable saga and gives it a fictional spin as she recounts the story of Bittersweet, a peasant farmer's daughter who becomes the wife of a famous Chinese leader, endures civil and world wars, and celebrates her hundredth birthday as the students protest in Tiananmen Square. From birth, Bittersweet seems marked for great things: she's a fourth daughter who should have been killed at birth, but her vitality so impresses her mother that she spares the child--a decision reinforced by the fortuneteller's prediction that a good, long life lies ahead. The child thrives, survives a near-fatal illness, and, defying custom, marries a young man, Delin, whom she chooses herself. Delin, a farmer's son turned soldier, advances rapidly to become a military hero, an ally of Chiang Kai-shek's, and eventually vice-president. Bittersweet, eponymously named, shared his glory but not his heart, for though she gives him a son, Delin soon takes a second wife. Bittersweet's is a story of survival, of courageously adapting to difficult circumstances that include the upheavals of war, exile in Hong Kong, and, with her son and his family, the US. After the Cultural Revolution, there's a return to China, where Bittersweet attains that great objective of Chinese happiness--``four generations living under the same roof.'' Accompanying the story are digressions into Chinese history and custom that are sometimes so insistent that Bittersweet's remarkable life and character are lost in the intrusion. Promising and certainly instructive, but a bit of a bumpy ride. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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