Book review: The Empress Lover, by Linda Jaivin

by Linda Jaivin
Fourth Estate
4 stars
Sue Green

On June 4, the 25th anniversary of the government crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square was marked around the world. So it is apposite that in this latest novel by a US-born Australian writer closely connected with China for almost four decades, those events have a central role.

This is the seventh novel by Linda Jaivin, onetime journalist, now a short story and playwright, non-fiction author and essayist, including essays on China. Her work ranges from bestselling erotica to the story of her friendship with Taiwanese singer-songwriter Hou Dejian, who took part in the protests (Jaivin was also in Beijing then).

The Empress Lover draws on these seemingly disparate threads as Jaivin skilfully interweaves fact and fiction, contemporary events with those of Beijing in 1989 and in 1944, within a narrative rich with literary, poetic and philosophical references.

Australian translator Linnie was raised by her aunt and uncle, but wears two jade bracelets left her by her mother and may be part-Chinese. She has returned to Beijing, where she lived in the 1980s, working as a film subtitler, when she receives a letter from someone claiming to know about her background, with a reference to "your honourable father".

"This, I quickly realised, was that letter, the one for which we wait our entire life."