Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China

by Hualing Nieh, Sau-ling Wong (Afterword)

Overview

This extraordinary novel, winner of a 1990 American Book Award, recounts the story of two women—Mulberry and Peach—who are really one. Mulberry is a young woman who has fled the turmoil of postwar China to settle in the United States. Unable to forget the terrors she has witnessed or resolve the conflicts between her new life and her old, she develops a second personality: fearless, tough-talking, sexually uninhibited, Peach. While Mulberry clings to her cultural and ethical roots, Peach renounces her past to embrace the American way of life with a vengeance.

Brilliantly innovative in style, Mulberry and Peach offers a rare women's perspective on the upheavals of modern China, and presents an unforgettable portrait of the pain of cultural dislocation and the anguish of psychological disintegration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558617315
Publisher:	Feminist Press at CUNY, The
Publication date:	01/01/1997
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	873,188
File size:	883 KB

Editorial Reviews

Nieh (also known as Hua-ling Nieh Engle) has written many novels and short stories, most untranslated. In this novel, Mulberry and Peach represent the dual aspects of a Chinese woman caught between men and women, Communism and dictatorship, China and the United States, connection and withdrawal, freedom and imprisonment. We follow her for 20 years as she moves from Beijing to Chungking to Taipei and then from the American Midwest to the West. The story ingeniously blends letters to an immigration officer, dream sequences, fairy tales, maps, diagrams, cartoons, and poems. Recommended for libraries wanting a good collection of contemporary Chinese literature. Kitty Chen Dean, Nassau Community. Coll., Garden City, N.Y.

Library Journal

A disquieting study of psychological and cultural schizophrenia . . . perceptive and powerful." —Publishers Weekly

"Seldom has a Chinese work of fiction so felicitously yoked together elements of symbolism, poetry, historical reconstruction, fantasy—and language so taut with tension that the protagonists' destinies seem to hinge on a word play, and a nation's future is betrayed by an allegory." —Asiaweek

"The conflict between Mulberry and Peach—the dual personalities locked within the heroine—symbolizes the conflict that has faced all those Chinese whose lives have been disrupted by the great political upheavals of modern China." —People's Daily, China

From the Publisher