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Review | Tale of two Chinas – Taiwan and mainland, cosmopolitan and provincial – by Lo Yi-Chin, Faraway is a novelistic memoir about a father’s illness and a son’s dilemma
- Lo Yi-Chin’s memoir about the forces of illness, duty and bureaucracy sees its lead character torn between meeting the needs of a sick father and pregnant wife
- Faraway’s literariness references Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul. But its terrain is that of two Chinas
Reading Time:3 minutes
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Faraway by Lo Yi-Chin (translated by Jeremy Tiang), pub. Columbia University Press
The latest work from Taiwanese author Lo Yi-Chin is a novelistic memoir, set between Taiwan and mainland China at the turn of this century.
Or perhaps it’s a novel where the main character shares the name of the author. According to its translator, “When I pressed him as to how much of the story was fictional, he claimed not to remember.”
Either way, Faraway is a work of deep introspection and sometimes overflowing imagery, a meditation on ageing and family, a memoir or novel of the wearing forces of illness, duty and bureaucracy.
It tells the painful story of Lo Yi-Chin’s journey to mainland China to bring back his aged and critically ill father.
Bernard Cohen is an award-winning novelist, based in Sydney, Australia. He is also Director of The Writing Workshop, and has taught creative writing to 100,000 young people. His latest book is the short story collection When I Saw the Animal (UQP).
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