Amazon will try to steer you to the Kindle edition of this novel. If you have the money it's worth buying the real book.
Author: Iris Yang
Publisher: Open Books
Date: 2018
Length: 254 pages
ISBN: 978-1948598064
Quote:
"
"A war zone isn’t a place for anyone, let alone a beautiful girl like you. Those horrible things… You must have heard about some of them.”
“That’s why I have to go."
Iris Yang. Wings of a Flying Tiger (Kindle Locations 191-193). Open Books.
"
Trigger warnings: JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING that might activate anxiety, depression, guilt, rage, or grief is in this novel. It is a classical tragedy about the horrors of war. Read it when you feel ready to deal with any and all the unpleasant emotions known to humankind. Then feel cleansed, strong, and motivated to work for peace.
Wings of a Flying Tiger begins and ends with Danny, the American pilot who's taken out twelve other Japanese fighter planes before one of them takes him down too. In between chapters of Danny's story, we read mostly about Bai Moli, White Jasmine, the "tall" (five feet six!) and beautiful art student who "has to" make the trip to rescue her parents from the Rape of Nanking. Arriving just as her murdered parents' bodies begin to decompose, Jasmine becomes a sort of symbol of the city: brave and generous, tortured and violated, heroic to the end.
By a mistake the publisher sent me the second volume of a two-volume story first, so I knew that the first volume does not have a happy-ever-after ending for Jasmine. I did not guess how her story was going to end. The author has chosen to spare Danny, whom she rescues and promises to marry, and White Birch, her favorite cousin, from knowing all the details of Jasmine's story.
The year the young men really get to know Jasmine is in some ways a heartwarming one. Everyone is hiding from the war in a peaceful mountain village, full of old people and children who project their feelings for the young soldiers in their families onto the wounded soldier Danny. (Until Birch visits, the closest thing the village has to young men are two teenagers, an ordinary empty-headed kid called "Rock" and a slightly older but even dumber one called "Wood.") Most Chinese women have no formal education, a luxury only a few rich families can consider; Jasmine, Birch, and Birch's little sister Daisy speak English and Japanese as well as Chinese and are greatly respected, even though Jasmine is a shockingly modern girl who has actually touched Danny, once or twice even when he was conscious, before promising to marry him. Everyone likes their pet American "Flying Tiger." The children love his war stories, and Birch and Danny formally adopt each other as brothers. Most of the villagers have managed not to know much about what happened in faraway Nanking.
For those in my part of the world who have devoured all those stories of old China by Amy Tan, Gus Lee, Bette Bao Lord, and Carolyn See, here is that next part of the story where our favorite novelists usually tell us "And then the main characters came to America." Here is the part of Chinese history they left behind. It is not quaint and strange and very far away from the real world. It is real and dark and bitter and foul, and not something for the faint of heart to think about--except that it's what war is really like. Jasmine stays pure at heart; her fatal flaw is her unmitigated niceness; she's too good for this world. Danny accepts Birch in place of his lost buddy Jack, and might be able to accept Daisy in place of Jasmine when Daisy grows up, if Danny lives so long...what becomes of the young men is the other story readers will get in Will of a Tiger. The other characters, the nice old people, the adorable little children, poor clueless Rock and Wood...that's war, Gentle Readers. That's why war is never a good thing.
These stories are simply told, if not in "words of one syllable" at least in the commonly used words that put the books at a fifth grade reading level. That's because English is not Iris Yang's first language, not because the Flying Tiger stories are suitable for children. They're not. They contain explicit sex and graphic violence and the hatred that is part of war. Adults should read these novels if they dare, and renew their commitment to practice peace.
Buy them as new books, now, to show respect. This web site may offer them as Fair Trade Books if this web site lasts another ten years.
No comments:
Post a Comment