Book Review: Eighth Moon

Title: Eighth Moon

Author: “Sansan” with Bette Bao Lord

Date: 1964, 1984

Publisher: Hale (U.K.), Sphere / Harper (U.S.)

ISBN: none

Length: 183 pages

Quote: “I wondered about America, where my family was living...I knew little about America except for political theories.”

Bette Bao Lord is the author of two bestselling novels: In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, based on the Chinese-American immigrant experience of her childhood, and Spring Moon, based on her family stories of Old China. Eighth Moon is a first-person narrative, told to Lord as true, about the experience of her sister who was left behind to grow up in Mao's China.

In 1964, when Eighth Moon was first published, “Sansan” was still a young student and her story basically ends with her defection to the United States.

It's not the kind of big splashy novel American consumers of China-based fiction have learned to expect. Here is none of the red-and-gold exoticism of Spring Moon. Sansan, about the same age as the Clintons and W Bush, grows up in a thoroughly modern “Communist” China, feet unbound but education rigidly limited, eating bran muffins rather than rice, kowtowing to “criticism and confession” sessions rather than quaint rituals of ancestor-worship. She travels by trains, reads strictly censored newspapers, goes to a modern coeducational school where assignments include scooping up fresh horse manure from the streets (for agriculture class, the students cultivate mushrooms on it).

In 1964 “the new miracle antibiotics” were a hot topic in the English-speaking world. China, Sansan reports, didn't have the benefit of them. People sweated out fevers for weeks or even years. One of her friends developed tuberculosis and continued to go to school, wearing a face mask, until the end.

The Chinese government had recognized the dangers of overpopulation, and traditional Chinese parents had always frowned on teen romance...and Sansan's story is 99% sex-free. There is a mention of her having squelched a corrupt inspector with the suggestion that he was trying to peek at her blouse. There is a school friend with whom Sansan at first engaged in honest, spontaneous, idealistic-early-teenager-type self-criticism (“Please, don't steal any more”), but before they're full-grown this mutual self-improvement leads the boy to blurt out criticisms of Sansan to adults, where the criticism will be used against her in her job; this, of course, is unforgivable.

Among the ickiest things Sansan reports about Mao's China is the extremely ambiguous benefits of having family members in Hong Kong and America. Good “Communists” with relatives in capitalist countries get more of certain rationed goods so their letters will sound less dreary. They also come in for closer, harsher scrutiny. Sansan grows up calling other relatives her parents, calling her grandmother “Grandmother” but believing it's an empty courtesy title for a distant relative. Then as a teenager she learns that her real family structure is the reverse of what she's always thought it was.

And why was she always called Sansan, anyway? This was a nickname, not her official given name. It was heard as “Three-Three,” and another child taunted her, “[W]here are children number one and two?” Sansan accepted the unlikely story that she was called “Three-Three” because she was born on the sixth of the month, as a child, rather than dig for the truth that children number one and two had escaped to America with their natural parents. How people long to believe what we'd prefer to be the truth...

Is it possible that Sansan is emphasizing the worst things about her life in China for immigration purposes? It's probable. Then again, why would she want to do that? I think of a TV sitcom of which I remember only ever watching one episode, where the characters overhear a man pleading with immigration officials that he had to escape from the oppressive regime--“Mr. Wossname, our records show that you're from Canada,” an official says severely, and Mr. Wossname whines, “It was cold!” Any possibility that anyone from Canada ever complains about any temperature being too cold is good for a laugh in the warmer half of the continent and yet, if people want to live in a whole different country to get away from cold weather, it seems to me we have to admit that, for them, cold weather is oppressive. Maybe they're on anti-hypertensive medication. Sansan claims no special vocation to practice any form of medicine, admittedly wants to go to medical school to qualify for the highest-paid job she thinks she can qualify for, does not present herself as someone you want to see become a doctor, but in a real democracy she would at least have been allowed enough training to steer her into medical research writing rather than told she had to be a primary school teacher.