Book Review: Spring Moon

A Fair Trade Book



Title: Spring Moon

Author: Bette Bao Lord

Date: 1981

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none

Length: 435 pages with appendices

Illustrations: endpapers showing the type of house where the story takes place, drawn by Timothy Tsao

Quote: “If only they could be here—everyone together in Soochow—for a week, even an hour.”

Spring Moon, granddaughter of a prestigious Hanlin scholar in imperial China, was once told in youth that she’d live to see five generations of her family. She will, too, impossible though it seems after Mao’s revolution, because members of her family are willing to travel to faraway America.

Bette Bao Lord belonged to that sort of family. She was one of the young children who were taken to America before the revolution. Spring Moon is a novel, not a biography of Mrs. Lord’s grandmother. As a member of Mrs. Lord’s grandmother’s generation Spring Moon represents thousands of women who lived through cataclysmic cultural change.

As a novel, Spring Moon was almost unique in its day. It spawned a genre. Sometimes it seems as if Chinese-American authors need only invent a character and, snap, the melodrama the twentieth century brought to China is good for a novel about how Our Hero or Heroine survived the part of it s/he saw. I’m not complaining. The novels are vividly imagined adventures, often based on real people’s memories. There’s a lot of violence and kinky sex built into twentieth century Chinese history; the novels don’t need to add more, or wallow in details. While the authors are telling us what the characters had for dinner—which is still likely to sound pretty exotic, not likely to be sold at the local Chinese take-out—or what game the children were playing, or what color a character’s coat was and why, that appeal to our lower natures is pulsing away in the background.

And of course, in my part of the world, there were the years around the turn of the century when the Chinese government was cracking down on failure to check overpopulation and American pro-lifers were trying to adopt every third child a Chinese couple produced. We now have a generation of Chinese-American youth who have names like Tyler and Megan, who grew up eating McDonald’s hamburgers and watching television and speaking English with Southern U.S. accents, whose families look for books that may help them understand something about their biological families’ history. “The matter of China” is a hot topic for fiction and nonfiction.

Bette Bao Lord started it with stories like this one, in which we first meet the great-great-grandmother Spring Moon as a little girl, in the 1890s, with bound feet and relatives who thought it irregular that her Yale-educated uncle wanted to educate her. But that was a very proper and appropriate education; apparently the sympathetic uncle, Bold Talent, didn’t touch her until Spring Moon came home as a young widow with only one daughter. Then, although Bold Talent’s wife was still living, the niece and uncle had a passionate romance...there’s no wallowing in details, but there’s a son, quickly sent to live with a poor family so that he can be legally “adopted” from them a few years later.

Spring Moon’s daughter, the rebel Lustrous Jade, gets to enjoy being tall (by Chinese standards) and having “big” (unbound) feet, but not without a price. Her education takes place in a mission school where an English name and a morbid sense of guilt are thrust upon her. In all her revolutionary frenzy she fails to loot her family’s home, and eventually her Maoist comrades demonstrate that being a Maoist was its own punishment.

To my taste the timing of the story seems a little unbalanced—after a nice long wallow in the exotic long-gone days of Spring Moon’s youth, we’re fast-forwarded into the 1980s, with abundant evidence that Spring Moon’s grandchildren’s lives have been every bit as adventurous as hers but with hardly a full sentence to spare for any of their adventures. Though the reasons for this are obvious, it clashes with the fictional biography form. It makes following the story seem a bit like following a river, by canoe, to the point where the river sinks into a bog and goes underground.

What you won’t want to miss, in spite of this irregularity in the plot, is the convincing sense of how Spring Moon and Bold Talent are able to individuate even in a stultifying conformist environment. Despite the inherent ickiness of their relationship, their other adventures are a triumphant feel-good read.

Bette Bao Lord is still alive, so if you buy Spring Moon as a Fair Trade Book ($5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment) this web site will send $1 to her or a charity of her choice. If you add In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson to the package, bringing the total cost to $15 (U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322) or $16 (Paypal to the address salolianigodagewi @ yahoo will send you), we'll send $2 to Mrs. Lord or her charity. If you order all four of her books, I think they'll all fit into one package, and the author or her charity will get $4.