Review: ‘Fu Ping’ by Wang Anyi, trans. Howard Goldblatt

Literature is a unique way of giving you an insight into other people's lives. The advice to 'write what you know' may seem trite at this point, but I have always loved the opportunity it has given me to get to understand the world better this way.  Thanks to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 8/27/2019

Publisher: Columbia University Press

A novel of Shanghai’s lower classes from the Man Booker International Prize-nominated author

Nainai has lived in Shanghai for many years, and the time has come to find a wife for her adopted grandson. But when the bride she has chosen arrives from the countryside, it soon becomes clear that the orphaned girl has ideas of her own. Her name is Fu Ping, and the more she explores the residential lanes and courtyards behind Shanghai’s busy shopping streets, the less she wants to return to the country as a dutiful wife. As Fu Ping wavers over her future, she learns the city through the stories of the nannies, handymen, and garbage collectors whose labor is bringing life and bustle back to postwar Shanghai.

Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shanghai in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Wang Anyi, one of contemporary China’s most acclaimed authors, explores the daily lives of migrants from rural areas and other people on the margins of urban life. In shifting perspectives rich in detail and psychological insight, she sketches their aspirations, their fears, and the subtle ties that bind them together. In Howard Goldblatt’s masterful translation, Fu Ping reveals Wang Anyi’s precise renderings of history, class, and the human heart.

Wang Anyi grew up in Shanghai and began her career as a writer in 1978 after being sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Her books in English include The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Columbia, 2008), a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. She is a professor of Chinese literature at Fudan University. 

Howard Goldblatt, a Guggenheim Fellow, is an internationally renowned translator of Chinese fiction, including the novels of Mo Yan, the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

As some of you may know, I’ve lived in Shanghai for almost 3 years now. It’s a fascinating city, full of contradictions and surprises, and it’s where I found my cat. It’s also a city that can escape definition, because what do you say of a place filled by 23 million people from all over China and all over the world? I’ve found myself in the past few months looking for books about or set in Shanghai and Fu Ping was one of the first. In this calm and wonderful story, Wang Anyi depicts Shanghai in a way that still feels true, even if the story is set a while back. Here is a city full of people moving quickly from the old to the new, with an older generations not always understanding what drives a younger generation.

Fu Ping is a meandering novel. Technically it is about a young girl, Fu Ping, who is brought to visit Nainai in Shanghai, so the latter can test whether she'd be a suitable bride for her adopted grandson. But Fu Ping does not just focus on Fu Ping or Nainai. Instead it becomes a larger exploration of the lives of working class women in Shanghai in the '60s. In a way, Fu Ping feels more like an assorted group of character sketches. This is what felt truest to me, the asides on each of the people Fu Ping meets while visiting Nainai. Most of these characters are women and many are from outside Shanghai, having traveled to the city to work there as housekeepers and nannies. They send money home to support families in the smaller villages outside the city, but their lives are now very far removed from these villages. We don't get to see everything about these women, which means they remain somehow incomplete, but this almost adds to the feeling that you're moving through the city itself slowly and steadily. You only get the faintest of glimpses at the full lives being lived.

Wang Anyi creates a vivid portrait of a vibrant city, as well as complicated portraits of complicaed people. Fu Ping, for example, is not your everyday main character. She is incredibly passive, recalcitrant and stoic. She is thrust into an environment she has no power in. Anyi doesn't show us much of Fu ping's internal life, but does follow her as she moves through Shanghai. Although it is not directly stated, Anyi hints at how this quiet attitude is Fu Ping's way of observing and learning, while it is also the end result of never truly having a voice. At times it can seem as if Fu Ping is more of a historical record, capturing what live was like in Shanghai during the mid-20th century, without infusing a true plot. And yet I felt very gripped, emotionally, by the story of Fu Ping and the lives of those around her. Howard Goldblatt does a wonderful job at translating and capturing the details of Anyi's narrative. Not everyone will appreciate the translation choice of adding line numbers, but it didn't distract me.

I give this novel...

4 Universes.

Fu Ping is a very unusual yet very fascinating read.  For anyone interested in gathering a glimpse of what Shanghai was and is like, Fu Ping is an excellent starting point.