Bi Feiyu’s Three Sisters follows the lives of three sisters of the Wang family in a remote village in China. The novel at times seems more like three separate novellas, since the three sections, Yumi, Yuxiu and Yuyang, named after the three Wang sisters, are separate plots in themselves, with nothing noticeably binding them. However, the undercurrents of the impact of the cultural revolution in China, hierarchy, and the “saving face” attitude that prevailed then are prevalent throughout the book.
The book highlights the power dynamics, the patriarchal set-up and the sexual exploitation of women and their lowly position in China, especially rural China, in the seventies and eighties. They have little power to alter the course of their destinies and are reduced to objects that exist merely to serve men. Society’s attitude towards women is best summed up in the line “What does a woman live for anyway? If she shuns running a household, what besides a rotten egg with a watery yolk is she?” The resistance that the three sisters put up to this shallow outlook, albeit in their own unique ways, is another common thread.
The book opens in 1971, telling the story of Yumi, the eldest of the Wang sisters. After seven daughters, Yumi’s mother has finally borne a son, whom she now hands over to Yumi. This, in more ways than one, lifts the strong and ambitious Yumi’s status to that of the head of the family. The mother, having finally delivered what was always demanded of her, now fades into obscurity. Yumi’s father, Wang, a communist party secretary, is a vagabond who has bedded almost every woman in the village. Wang’s wanton ways finally cause her engagement with a respectable man from a neighbouring town being called off. However, Yumi, eager to rise to prominence and gain power, settles for the role of a second wife to Guo, a powerful man in a different village.
The second part is about the Wang family’s third daughter, Yuxiu, who, to a large extent, inherits her father’s vagabond nature. Not one who takes kindly to authority, Yuxiu resents Yumi and the power she wields over the family. Yuxiu, the “fox fairy”, lacks Yumi’s conviction and zest for dignity. Once, out to watch a movie, Yuxiu becomes the victim of a gang rape, carried out as revenge on her father. Reduced to an outcast and unable to bear the taunts of villagers and the shame of what is seen as her shortcoming, she leaves the village and goes to live with Yumi. However, Yuxiu’s philandering ways result in a rift with Yumi, especially when she tries to please Guo’s daughter and seduce his son. The strife comes to a head when Yumi is pregnant, as Yuxiu sees her influence dwindling and realises she would soon lose whatever little stature she has managed to attain. The difference between the two sisters and the ways in which they try to overcome the hardships that have befallen them form the crux of the book.
The third section opens after a gap of about ten years and tells the story of Yuyang, the seventh Wang sister. Having won a scholarship to a teaching college in a city, she gets involved with the city’s twisted ways and intrigue. Yuyang’s position is not taken too kindly by her fellow teachers and students, and they suspect her of spying on them. As was the case with her sisters, Yuyang slowly discovers society’s penchant for deceit and corruption.
Bi Feiyu shares a liking for the rural way of life in China with a lot of his contemporaries. Three Sisters lays bare the life and times of rural China, and the dichotomy it reflects with urban life. Once, after realising it was actually Little Tang who had gained from Yuxiu’s travails with the abacus, Yuxiu says, “That’s what living in a town can do for you.” All the three sisters embrace city life, willingly or otherwise. This is also true of a good many villagers in China — the dominant population in a country torn between tradition and change.
The book is replete with Chinese proverbs, aphorisms and parallels between human life and nature. “My sister is like water, always finding a way to flow downward,” Yuxiu says of Yumi. Once in the city, Yuyang thinks, “She really didn’t amount to much; she was like a squirt of urine in the Yangtze River.”
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Though the book lacks a comprehensive plot, it makes up by presenting complete and rounded characters. The translators, Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, preserve Bi Feiyu’s simple language and common-folk talk, and this goes well with the overall simplicity and the landscape maintained throughout the book.
As in The Moon Opera, Bi Feiyu uses the themes of gossip and a fear and loathing of the truth in Three Sisters. These best serve to portray the depths to which society in China, struggling to grapple with communist ideals and the social change it engendered, had descended.
THREE SISTERS
Bi Feiyu
Om Books International
310 pages; Rs 295