Bittersweet (H)

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.

First novelist Li transforms the eventful life of her Chinese grandmother Li Xiuwen--who was born in 1889 and became the wife of Li Zongren, a major political figure in modern China--into an appealing story. Interpolating fresh historical research, Li describes the century of vital change that her protagonist, called Bittersweet, witnessed: an era that stretched from the end of the empire to the tragedy of the Tiananmen Square massacre. At age 19, farm girl Bittersweet marries Delin, a nationalist commander who will become China's first elected vice president and acting president for his wily "sworn brother" Chiang Kai-shek. Schooled in Taoist acceptance by a monk whose pure love sustains her throughout many troubles, Bittersweet endures the anguish of being permanently displaced in her husband's affection by his westernized second wife. Against a setting of war and political turmoil, Li spins a fascinating chronicle of female subservience, in which wedding and birth customs, infanticide and the cruel rivalries between wifely "battalions" all come vividly alive. Expository digressions sometimes impede the narrative flow, as does the hasty wrap-up, which details Bittersweet's sojourn in America and her return to China, but seasoned journalist Li largely succeeds in recasting factual material into an engrossing novel.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.