Review | Yan Lianke’s Three Brothers honours his family and the struggle to survive in mid-20th century China
- The book is a memoir of the author’s father and uncles, with a portrait of the young Yan woven in between
- Poverty, love and the luxury of happiness are all explored in a poignant story as affecting as any of Yan’s fictions
Three Brothers
by Yan Lianke
Chatto & Windus
4.5/5 stars
The germ of the idea, as he reveals in a preface, was a sudden realisation in 2007 “that four men in my father’s generation – which included three brothers and a cousin – had now departed this world, seeking peace and tranquillity in another realm”. The specific occasion was the death of his “Fourth Uncle”. It was while the family were paying their respects that Yan’s sister said, “Our father’s generation have now all passed away. Why don’t you write about the three brothers? […] You can also write about yourself – about your youth.”
This is what Three Brothers attempts, telling the life stories of his father, “First Uncle” and “Fourth Uncle”. Snaking through this trilogy is something like an autobiography of the artist as a young man. Yan slowly matures from a somewhat self-centred child, desperate to escape the poverty of rural life, into a somewhat self-centred man, desperate to become a writer.
In many respects, the stories of the three Yan brothers are one story: of a peasant’s struggle to survive in mid-20th century China. “What kinds of things did Father, as a peasant living in this world, have to achieve before his death? What responsibilities did he have to fulfil?” Yan writes. The answer, broadly speaking, is withstand almost literally back-breaking toil, find enough food to avoid starvation and keep roofs over family heads. Such hardship can make otherwise precious virtues such as happiness and dignity appear luxuries, and even patriarchal duties like building homes, finding wives for sons and dowries for the daughters peripheral.
Yan’s father worked for years making his small plot of land fertile enough to plant sweet potatoes and sprouts, only to receive an order from the central authorities to hand over his self-cultivated land to the collective. “This was in 1966,” Yan notes without further comment.
As well as highlighting what united the three men, Yan’s closely observed prose evokes each individual character’s strengths and weaknesses, foibles and talents. The most obvious difference is geographical. While Yan’s father and First Uncle remained in their rural birthplace, Fourth Uncle worked in a cement factory in Xinxiang. Yan ponders these decisions into something resembling philosophy (which he views with scepticism on more than one occasion).
Three Brothers includes lengthy meditations on fate, change, happiness and what Yan calls “life” as opposed to “living”. “Living,” he argues, “suggests a process of enduring day after day, with each day being the same, and implies a kind of monotony and boredom [...] Life conveys a sense of richness, of progress and the future.”
Fourth Uncle, with his drive to escape and transcend his origins, personifies the latter. For all their admirable achievements, Yan’s father and First Uncle are resigned – or consigned – to “living”. Their triumphs seem to occur despite their surroundings (thanks to ceaseless toil, family support, intelligence and good fortune), while their defeats occur because of them: illness, lack of education, desperation, inherent powerlessness.
What breathes life into these themes and ideas is Yan’s impressionistic form of family biography. An anecdote or passage is often triggered by his own personal and idiosyncratic memories: the knitted socks that remind him of First Uncle, or the almost absurdly glamorous polyester work shirt that Fourth Uncle donates to a grateful and suddenly cool nephew.
By collapsing time, this almost Proustian method frequently brings both Yan and the reader face to face with himself. Three Brothers contains valuable revelations of the writer’s formative years, the challenges he faced and overcame, and his early literary ambitions. A short passage in praise of his first teacher (“who was able to enter people’s hearts”) triggers this all-encompassing observation: “it seemed that my subsequent self-awakening – including my self-respect and my understanding of the relationship between men and women, between the city and the countryside, together with my veneration for revolution – all originated in this period.”
The Yan Lianke that emerges is a contradictory, liminal and even tortured figure, hovering perpetually on the threshold between the urban and rural worlds, a part of and apart from both
Of all these diverse acts of self-awakening, it is Yan’s vexed relationship with “the city and the countryside” that energises Three Brothers. One can hear the tension in the opening sentence: “Some people spend their entire lives in their own home, village, or city, while others spend their lives elsewhere. There are also some people who end up constantly travelling back and forth between home and another place.” One hears it in his adolescent resentment towards the wealthy, entitled and urban “Young Revolutionaries” who briefly condescend to peasants such as Yan’s family. One hears it in his own desperation to escape those same peasants and in his decision to join the army, where he also begins his literary career.
The Yan Lianke that emerges is a contradictory, liminal and even tortured figure, hovering perpetually on the threshold between the urban and rural worlds, a part of and apart from both. His attempt (however unconsciously) to express seemingly irreconcilable feelings lends Three Brothers its compelling ambience and occasional emotional rawness.
This is most vividly expressed in Yan’s different relationships with each of the three brothers. His admiration for Fourth Uncle is visible in Yan’s emulation of his outgoing ambition. His uncle’s final years, by contrast, offer a melancholy reflective preview of his own marginal, even purgatorial existence: “only after he returned to his hometown, where he knew virtually everyone, did he finally realise that while the city did not belong to him, neither did the countryside”.
Yan’s affection for and even veneration of First Uncle inspires this declaration: “I truly felt he was the most extraordinary person in our village, and even in the entire world.” But such praise requires that Yan absolve him of grave personal failings – in modern parlance, a gambling addiction that at its worst endangers his family’s future and compels him to attempt suicide.
But what might seem like woeful passivity is for Yan evidence of his uncle’s underlying “goodness and magnanimity”. This enabled him to overcome the actual suicide of his son, Tiecheng, and forgive those who may have caused it.
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The most complicated and revealing relationship of all is between Yan and his father, whose work ethic, family loyalty, battles with serious ill health (asthma) and ceaseless encouragement of his son’s ambitions propose him as a paternal hero. The problem is all Yan. He records, with a candour that is by turns startling and oddly admirable, the dark materialistic thoughts that haunt his father’s prolonged illness. “As long as Father is alive, our family (or perhaps just me) won’t be able to enjoy a good life.”
This fundamental contrast – the uncomplaining nobility of the father versus the selfishness of the son – creates feelings of filial guilt that climax with his father’s death in 1984. His final words, addressed from his deathbed to Yan himself, were: “Quick, go get something to eat.”
It is not hard to read this portrait of one of China’s generation gaps as an act of abased self-criticism. “What kind of son am I?” Yan writes, before describing the memoir as a “process of repentance and purification”.
What is being repented, it seems, is his own material success, his intense ambition and innate self-centredness, all of which was made possible by the suffering of his predecessors. At such moments, one hears the same dejection that defeated the fictional Yan Lianke in The Day the Sun Died, who stared into China’s modern economic miracle and saw darkness, heartache and emptiness lurking below the glittering and seemingly calm surface.
In Three Brothers, the disillusion is turned inwards. If Yan drifts occasionally towards nostalgia and sentimentality when recording his three elders and betters, he is also clear-eyed in remembering their shortcomings, in describing their labours and honouring his own debts with a sincerity as affecting as any of his fictions. “I was truly blessed to have had Father and my uncles in my life. While I was growing up virtually the only thing I didn’t lack was a feeling of warmth and protection.”
