Swallowing Clouds - Hardcover

The emotional plight of a Chinese exile is the theme of Ng's second novel (after Silver Sister). Born in a mud hut in a village near Shanghai, Syn endures her first exile, to Inner Mongolia, during the Cultural Revolution. Later, she seizes an opportunity to leave China on a temporary visa to study English in Sydney, Australia. In 1989, when she watches TV coverage of the Tiananmen Square uprising, Syn joins other overseas Chinese in protesting the massacre. Immediately, she is blacklisted, money ceases to arrive from her family in Shanghai and she is forced to take a job in Zhu Zhiyee's butcher shop. Stout, middle-aged, lascivious and married, Zhu becomes Syn's lover, sets her up in her own home and introduces her to the possibilities of erotic love. Their sexual exploration is stark and disturbing, graphic in its pain and pleasures. When Zhu tires of her, Syn remembers the words of a soothsayer about a woman drowned for the sin of adultery while her lover goes free. Her stoic despair when she seems to have lost everything is moving. The descriptions of the affair are juxtaposed with scenes several years later, in 1994, when Syn (in her 40s) returns to China with an Australian tour group and is reunited with her long-suffering mother. Ng uses the tour group as a device to explicate Chinese history and mythology, via the tour guide's narration. The contrast between the vicissitudes of one life and the relentless sweep of history is more effectively evoked through Syn's own story: her abandonment to erotic love, and her hopes for a safe future, seen against the dramatic backdrop of China's political upheaval. Readers seduced by Ng's sensuous prose and her unusual story may overlook the fragmented structure and chronological inconsistencies (references to Syn's age during certain historical events do not add up; a missing decade is never accounted for) but the intensely erotic love scenes overpower the rest of the narrative, to its detriment. (July) FYI: Silver Sister won the Human Rights Award for fiction in 1995.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A young Chinese woman exiled to Australia reenacts the ancient rituals of sex with a married manwith disastrous resultsin a first US publication by the Singapore-born Ng. Syn, an English student in Sydney, is also the reincarnation of an adulterous Shanghai woman drowned in a pig basket in 1918. Far from home during the Tiananmen Square massacre, Syn's show of support for the students there results in the termination of her grant and her rights of citizenship. Desperate to make ends meet, she takes a job in the butcher shop of Zhu Zhiyee, who quickly enlists her as his concubine. With pleasure, she agrees to facilitate him sexually (and, in the novel, at length) and emotionally. Zhu, wealthy from his thriving business, puts her up in the ultimate Luv Hut, a virtual mansion equipped with hooks in the ceiling from which she may dangle, happily bound, while he penetrates her passage of yin with his stiff jade whisk. Zhus explorations in this area are exhaustive: smells, tastes, tongues, armpits, and pubic hairs all blend to provoke sexual transcendence. During an early mopping up, Zhu confides that his young daughter, BaiTien, is autistic and has undergone a hysterectomy. Then, Zhu's wife catches on to his extracurricular activities and sees to it that Syn is fired from the shop; BaiTien is relocated to an institution; and Zhu's ``Chinese Sausage'' is kept trouser-bound. Meanwhile, Syn has become pregnant, miscarries, and recalls traditional loyalty to her mother in Shanghai, who refuses to join her daughter in Sydney. This entire paper-thin story is recalled when Syn visits China in 1994; as her tour-group views the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the Summer Palace, she ponders the eerie parallels between her tale and her country's history. Unmotivated sex, even as syrupy as this, is the province of windup toys. And because Ngs characters are sketched in monotone, their fate inspires only mystification. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.