The Facts

• Published: 2022
• Original language: English‍
• Genre: Fiction novel, historical fiction
• Number of pages: 400

The Gist

*spoiler alert*

The years could easily accumulate when there was no change on the horizon, their numbers only becoming pronounced when you looked back and they surprised you. Niannian was evidence, in fact, that time could change a person so much that they would no longer even notice the scar that marked them.

This book completely dug its claws into my soul. We first meet Yitian Tang in 1993 as a mathematics professor in a prestigious (yet unnamed) American university. He’s from China but has lived in the states with his wife, Mali, for nearly a decade. One day he receives a disturbing call from his mother, who reveals Yitian’s father has gone missing. Yitian hasn’t spoken to his father in 15 years, reason why he hasn’t gone back home to the Village he grew up in ever since he moved as a teenager. The cause of the fight is simple yet complex: Yitian’s father wants him to not get educated, to stay home and become a farmer like he is and like everyone in his family has always been. They’re farmers, what’s so wrong about that? Why doesn't he want to stay with his own?

But Yitian has dreams of going to college and improving his financial standing; dreams that eventually mark a breaking point in his family. Hopping between 1970s and 1993, the story takes us back to a rural village in the middle of mainland China, where we learn about Yitian’s past, how he grew up, how the Chinese navigate sociopolitical turmoils, and Yitian’s multigenerational pilgrimage to find his father after ten years of not seeing him.

It was amazing, he'd thought back then, that an unchanging property of an object wasn't only what was there, but also what wasn't. It meant that if you could define what was absent, create a map for the missing, that was also a way of knowing a thing.

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This is a book about identity, the weight of our choices, the meaning of “home”, and it’s also a deep examination of both family traditions and forgiveness. Tang (the author) vividly describes what daily life in a small village looks like, and how easy it is to fall through the cracks and forget your uniqueness. While the book centers on Yitian’s search for his father, the author does a masterful job at introducing other characters of other social classes, gender, and ages so that we get the full picture of the Chinese experience around these inflammated times. And on TOP of that, because Yitian is a math professor, we get a lot of analogies/story plot development through mathematical equations, which I think is absurdly amazing from the author’s part.

Feelings were worth only as much as the performances that demonstrated them,

It’s been a while since a book resonated with me on so many different levels. Hanwen, a girl from Beijing forced to work in the country by the Chinese government, meets Yitian when she’s a teenager and they both study for the gao kao exam together, and yet Yitian passes it while Hanwen doesnt. Tang uses the gao kao (高考) – an exam that only a very small percentage of Chinese people pass - to reveal the costs of pursuing one's dream and what we are forced to leave behind. Both Yitian and Hanwen struggle between pursuing their dreams and forging their own path in life, versus following cultural expectations of filial piety that require them to fulfill their obligations to their families. This is something we can all relate to; we've all been made to feel inadecuate and alienated by our family's expectations.

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She could see more clearly now that some things were not about want, but rather about the sacrifices one had to make to survive in this place, in this time. What her mother had been trying to tell her was that her dreams could no longer hold.

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One of my favorite things about this book is the perpetual feeling of being a foreigner wherever Yitian goes: conveying the unending struggle that immigrants like him have with reconciling the meaning of “home” and feeling like a “perpetual foreigner” in both the new and the old world. This book is an entire MEAL for your brain.

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Now a few things we should know:

• Gaokao exam: a standardized college entrance exam held annually in Mainland China, students are tested either in the natural sciences (Math, Chemistry, Physics) or liberal arts (History, Politics, Geography).
• Chinese Cultural Revolution: This was a sociopolitical movement launched by Mao Zedong during his last decade of power (1966-1976). He was afraid China would be led astray by the Russian Revolution in the early 1960s, and he also feared social stratification in a society as elitist as China. He then established this revolution with four goals: to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking; to rectify the Chinese Communist Party; to provide China’s youths with a revolutionary experience; and to achieve some specific policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist. In truth, what he wanted was to control China and make sure the cultural development remained Maoist. He began shutting down schools and everything that in his opinion was “bourgeois thinking,” and eventually created the Red Guard which was a group of radical paramilitaries who had permission to attack everyone they believed went against communist ideals. 

‍The Themes

• Family dynamics
• Forgiveness
• Chasing dreams
• Post Cultural-Revolution China
• Intergenerational trauma
• Masculinty, masculine stereotypes and expectations
• Social class and education
• Identity
• Loss
• The weight of cultural expectations versus personal ambition

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The Author

Belinda Huijuan Tang is a 2021 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She holds a BA from Stanford University and was a 2019 work-study fellow at the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lived in China from 2016 to 2018 and, while there, received an MA from Peking University in Beijing. She currently lives in Los Angeles, and in college she thought she would be an economist.

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