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When the textile merchant Jia Yun leaves Wuhan Province in China for British Guiana in around 1876, his letters to his sweetheart Li Jie, owner of the only bicycle in the province, are full of the vivid characters he meets, like his Afro-Guyanese guide, Harris (with his esoteric theories), and Indian Coolie Gurr (with his instinctive feeling for what a humane society should be like). They, like Jia Yun, are busy remaking themselves in the post slavery world of Demerara as it is changed by Indian, Chinese and Portuguese indentured immigration. But is Sweet Li Jie the person Jia Yun imagines her to be? She is the receiver of other kinds of stories in her Wuhan village. It is about to be engulfed by armed chaos, provoked not least by the second British opium war on China, bringing feudal society to its end. There is landlord Wang Changling, still writing epic narratives that hide from him his true nature and the reality he now inhabits. And there is his loyal/disloyal servant Baoyu with his shattered body and endlessly inventive stories of love, circus life, cruelty, dreaming and memory, wondering how he might best serve those even worse off than him.
About the author
David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He was sent to England aged thirteen, and was in care until he was eighteen. He read English at Cambridge, and has published seven earlier novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2008 he was awarded the prestigious Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Award.
Summary
Life in Wuhan and British Guiana is vividly evoked in this novel, told mainly through letters. Amidst the crumbling Chinese feudal system, and life under British colonial rule, the novel's characters seek personhood and interdependence.
