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Three Sisters Here comes a book that has the makings of an epic novel, where one really gets into the lives and times of the characters that grow and unfold as one devours page after page. It’s a book that makes you want to sit up and read late at night, even though you know you should sleep because you have an early start the next day.
The way of life is strange to us, but we get more familiar with it as we read through Bi Feiyu’s pages. His story is seeped in the cultural context, seemingly without endeavour, making it a significant work. The women’s stories, however, are familiar, since they touch on issues that are real to most Asian women. They are, thus, often tragic and sometimes triumphant. The book follows the fate of the three sisters-so disparate in their dispositions and bearing; yet their lives are intertwined. All three use the tools at their disposal to try and ensure better lives for themselves. Since they hail from a small village in China, these tools are limited, but while Yumi makes use of her dignity, Yuxiu uses her powers of seduction, and Yuyang her education to make the world a better place for themselves. All three sisters migrate to the city for different reasons. There is a conflict between the two elder sisters that ebbs and rages. The story of Yuyang seems rather disconnected, but it is placed a decade later, in the 1980s. One assumes that the author probably wants to show the shared struggle and pain of the three women. The book has it all-romance, sex, rape, compromise, treachery, seduction, concubines, upheavals of the most physical as well as emotional kind, but it never falls into the pit of the salacious or the melodramatic. In fact, it is uncompromising in holding up a mirror to the position of women in a country that treats them as a gender secondary to that of the male. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that it has been awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize, 2011. The judges of the committee called the work "a moving exploration of Chinese family and village life during the Cultural Revolution. That moves seamlessly between the epic and the intimate, the heroic and the petty, illuminating not only individual lives but an entire society, within a gripping tale of familial conflict and love". The book is spellbinding in its sweep of story and characters who go about their lives as the reader reads on and on.
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The story begins in a
small village in China, where seven sisters are born into the Wang
family-a great dishonour for the mother who sinks into lethargy until
she finally produces a boy, and then into still greater lethargy, since
she has finally managed to "save face". Three of the sisters,
Yumi, Yuxiu and Yuyang, emerge as the lead characters or heroines in
this significant novel, which is not just a tale of the fate of the
these three sisters but also a chronicle of the times that they live
through China of the 1970s, which is struggling through a Cultural
Revolution.