WHEN Li-young Lee sits down with his family around the kitchen table they are not short of things to talk about. At the turn of the century the family was genteel and wealthy, related by marriage to Chinese warlord Yuan Shih-kai. But their fortunes changed. Lee's father and mother lost two children in China, one murdered, one who died of rabies, before fleeing to Indonesia to escape the communist takeover.
Lee himself was born in Jakarta. There his family lost another child this time to meningitis, Lee's father was imprisoned, their house almost burnt down and the entire family was shipped off by the government to a remote prison island. On the way they managed to escape.
They came to Hong Kong in the early 1960s where his father was briefly a charismatic priest who gathered his followers by dropping leaflets from a plane over Hong Kong Island. Then he won a place at a religious training college in America. On the way there at least one of the children was sexually abused by their grandfather. Lee's father graduated from the college and settled with his family as the parish priest of a sleepy one-horse town in Pennsylvania.
In this work, there is the basis of a cracking good read. Sex, violence, persecution, imprisonment, migration and religious conviction should be enough for even an average novelist.
Sadly Lee manages to flunk the test, garbling his story and leaving the reader feeling cheated. Instead of playing it straight, Lee opts for a hazy, dream-like approach. He uses a fluid time-scale moving from the distant past back to the present in one long stream of consciousness.
This occasionally produces passages of great power. The contrast of his adult knowledge with his childhood naivety makes him at times an excellent storyteller. But the shift from past to present halts continuity.
