Ingratitude

by Ying Chen, Carol Volk (Translator)

"I was dying to see Mother suffer at the sight of my corpse," announces the young woman at the heart of this powerful and disquieting novel, which has won acclaim in France and in Canada upon original publication in French. In Ingratitude,Ying Chen tells the story of Yan-Zi, who decides to commit suicide in order to escape the yoke of her dominating mother. The narrator's account of her final days recalls the chilling detachment of Camus's The Stranger .

Genres: Fiction, China, Literary Fiction, France, Asia, Asian Literature, School

Paperback

First published August 1, 1995

About the author

Ying Chen (en chinois, 应晨) est une écrivaine sino-canadienne née à Shanghai en 1961. Ying Chen y poursuit ses études universitaires jusqu'à l'obtention de sa licence-ès-lettres françaises. Outre le dialecte de sa région et le mandarin, elle a appris le russe, l'italien, l'anglais et le français. En 1989, elle vient étudier au département de langue française de l'Université McGill. Elle a habité Magog et depuis 2003 réside à Vancouver. Elle est mère de deux enfants.
Puis pour tromper la nostalgie de sa Chine natale, elle se met à l'écriture jusqu'à y consacrer douze heures par jour. Lorsqu'elle commence ses journées, elle se laisse bercer par la musicalité des textes de Marcel Proust qu'elle lit à haute voix. Son premier roman La mémoire de l'eau relate l'histoire de la Chine contemporaine à travers les yeux de femmes de plusieurs générations. Son second, Lettres chinoises, a pour sujet la correspondance d'un jeune immigrant à sa fiancée restée en Chine, et témoigne du choc des cultures, du déracinement et de l'impossibilité de l'amour. Son roman L'ingratitude lui vaut le prix Québec-Paris décerné en février 1996 ainsi que le prix des lectrices de la revue Elle-Québec. Le roman Immobile a la saveur d'un conte de fées. Le temps est le principal sujet de ce roman et il porte sur la mémoire.

Reviews

[Rowena · Rating 5 out of 5]

“They cling to life the way feathers cling to a bird, without realizing how little they weigh. They hate those who’d rather set sail, abandon a life they don’t own, jump into the void, which at least has the advantage of being endless. They accuse them of cowardice to prove their own bravery. They take the liberty of judging the dead. As a result, the dead are seen differently from one era to the next: heavy or light, heroic or cowardly, valuable or useless, virtuous or immoral. Death has become just like anything else, something which they assign a price that varies with their mood.”

I read this book in one sitting. Not the cheeriest of topics but a well-written, poetic and psychological account of a suicidal girl who has a toxic relationship with her mother. It seems all her life her mother has been gearing her towards marriage while finding something to criticize with everything she does:

“I don’t owe you anything, Mother! You’ve always wanted me to be just like you, you live in my body without any invitation, and you decide so much of my fate! You’re such a tyrant!”

Our protagonist is fed up with her life and I think it has a lot to do with expectations of women in Chinese society. Perhaps as I’ve just been to China, I was curious about familial dynamics and expectations. Most of the people I met in China had no siblings and a few of them, especially the girls, talked about the pressure they sometimes felt to marry well. Yan-Zi doesn’t see much to look forward to in her life so decides to commit suicide as a punishment to her mother. This book goes back and forth between the thoughts of the spirit of the girl watching the mourners, and the events and careful planning leading up to her suicide. I followed them with a morbid fascination; some of the thoughts were truly twisted.

There is some discussion about the Chinese afterlife and Kong-Zi (Confucius), who was unfortunately slightly misogynist, at least from what I’ve read.

All in all, a quick and intriguing read.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This illusion had sustained her all these years, the inability to love being less hurtful than the desire not to love.

It's the morning after the US Mother's Day and I'm still recovering from my first period of being under the weather since leaving for this particular stint of college, all of which has such a delicious irony to it that Fate is certainly out there laughing her ass off. For such a small degree of relation, mother and child sure has a lot of abject yet pristine yet sacrosanct yet toxic baggage to it, and dragging my own experiences into the mix will inevitably feed on or the other or all as minutiae of the human species so often do. Despite that mess of a paradigm, any and all of it can be broken down into a nice and easy dichotomy: things that don't make you sick, and things that do. It's impossible to separate this sort of discourse from that of mental illness, and here I'm not even going to. Simply put, if you want your kid to turn out like me, make it clear to them their status as financial investment from day one. The way the world and its capitalism is, chances are good you're doing it already.

His parents' teachings were etched in his mind so clearly that if asked to choose between jumping out the window or leaving rice in his bowl, he would have had to think it over.

Panic over the world's rising population of human beings is a common enough topic, socioeconomically absurd when considering the US alone would need three earths to sustain its current rate of consumption, facile when the solution is of such ease. To riff off Swift, why eat babies when a singularly concise yet surprisingly multifarious question will eradicate landscapes of starving hoards? One: will you support your child unconditionally, regardless of what they are. One: will you support your child unconditionally, regardless of who they are. One: will you support your child unconditionally, regardless of who they become. Mothers bear the brunt of this when it comes to criminal progeny, but that's a minor matter when compared to that grand old consideration of eugenics and all its -normative qualities. If your child is autistic, will you indulge in murder suicide? If they come out as trans at the age of six, will you hit them across the face and consider therapy of the electric sort? If they don't go into engineering, if they marry someone whose every other but moral characteristic render them in your eyes anathema, if they sleep around or do drugs or happen to have more feelings and autonomy to them than a parakeet or a doormat: if any and all of that will cause you to pursue the futile path of Lear, disowning what can never on the grounds of blood and marrow be rendered null and void, you're unfit to breed. This is the same sort of careless murder that results in living rabbits thrown into trash cans post-Easter. If all that begetting brings you is an obsession with an entitlement to power, the best you can do is traumatize your offspring so much that they can't manage reality outside your grip à la capture bonding. The worst is they'll kill themselves, or you, or both. In between, they'll just coddle you at the end of the ten foot pole of polite society, eye your property, and wait on you to die.

She never hesitated to reveal all her truths, which I, as her daughter, was supposed to digest without difficulty. Yet she didn't accept my truths. She didn't want to believe I had truths of my own. If by some accident such truths did exist, Mother would do whatever she could to suppress them. So I came to understand that sincerity was not for everyone. Utter sincerity was the luxury of the strong.

If anyone brings up Oedipal complexes or Tiger Mothers I'm going to puke. This isn't about your (racialized) misogyny. This is about power and how, even on the most intimate and microcosmic of scales, it will inevitably all turn out.

I had been terrified and dreamed several times of a gruesome scene: I was lying in a pool of blood, my throat slit, at the foot of my parents' bed; Father was sitting on the bed, trembling, the still-warm knife in his hand; Mother had opened the door for the neighbors and was explaining that it was just an unfortunate accident. People believed her because she couldn't stop sobbing.

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5/5

Una madre sobreprotectora, controladora y absorbente. Una hija que se siente atrapada y se plantea la muerte como única vía de escape. Un suicidio por venganza. Una historia intensa, oscura y muy dura con profundas reflexiones sobre las relaciones materno filiales y lo tóxicas que pueden llegar a ser. Una pequeña joyita que me ha sorprendido muy gratamente.

“Según ella, el amor irracional es muy peligroso. Él podía turbar mi memoria, hacerme olvidar mis orígenes, abandonar a mamá y consagrarme a un pequeño desconocido que no había hecho nada por mí. Lo cual, naturalmente, significaba la ingratitud”

[Karine Mon coin lecture · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5
Un roman fort, dérangeant, qui explore une relation mère-fille toxique mais qui, selon une amie chinoise, représente ce qu'a été la culture chinoise à une époque. Une mère qui demande obéissance et gratitude, qui voit sa fille comme une prolongation d'elle-même et qui ne lui offrira jamais d'affection. Une fille qui étouffe, qui se sent en prison et qui - nous le savons dès les premières pages - s'est suicidée.

[yasmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

je suis en amour avec l'écriture de Ying Chen. Ce livre me fait penser à l'Étranger d'Albert Camus.

[Ming · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a flawed book, which prevents it from being powerful (which it clearly seeks to be) or entirely convincing (which I hoped for it to be). I felt more negatively about the book in the first 2/3 of it but towards the ending, Ying Chen improves and writes better. In the early parts of the book, however, the narrative voice speaks with the volume at 100%, tinny and cramped with (sometimes clumsy) metaphors that suggest at an intensity of feeling without really understanding its nature or its necessity. Human intensity isn't done well in literature very often, it seems. For instance, there are these morsels:

"“This room was going to spit me out after having held me for so many years"

"He was philosophising as much as he could. He was trying to imprison my soul in his spirit.”


Where the intensity feels contrived, in my opinion. simply because there's a bit too much imagination in the reaction, which has the result of focusing wrongly on the detail of the matter as opposed to the fact of the matter.

There are moments where Ying Chen's writing truly does work, where she has biting insight, and this seems to be the instances where she isn't trying so hard to write but just observing/responding without embellishments:

“I didn’t want to lie. I simply hoped to hide behind my obedience.”

“They gladly bow before this box of ashes. It’s easy to abase yourself in front of nothing. They grant themselves the pathetic pleasure of humbling themselves a bit when somebody else’s body vanishes – the superiority of being alive merits these few seconds of humility toward the dead. But there are limits to everything. One has to save face before the living. Thus, upon emerging from the cemetery, they all dry their eyes, recover their composure, and greet each other politely.”


But these usually come at the end and can't redeem the book entirely.


My feelings about this book are mixed. There's something about the anger that resonates with me (and, no doubt, many other Chinese children as well who feel constricted and are driven to the point of insanity because of how cultural values permit the careless use of guilt and shame) and this book is a useful mirror to my own feelings. This is a book that has moments of insight and reflection. Unfortunately, I think the ultimate failing of this book can best be understood by the words of Woolf in her essay, A Room of One's Own, where she lamented how Charlotte Bronte's gift as a writer was deformed by her "anger and bitterness." It's a tricky situation because the writer's anger and bitterness is what gives the writing and the story both its impetus and its focus - it's just a shame that Ying Chen didn't quite have the resources or the discipline as a writer to properly discipline those emotions into doing her bidding.

[Sarah karney · Rating 5 out of 5]

remove all sharp objects before reading this one...VERY intense

[Omar Rosales · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story is very dark, full of angst, and contains some of the most bitter prose I've read in a while. I could taste every single negative emotion the main character felt towards her mother.

[loqueleohoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Está bueno que se muestren relaciones madre-hija totalmente tóxicas y dañinas pero hubo algo en este libro que no me terminó de cerrar, no sé si fue la escritura o las diferencias culturales que hicieron que no lo termine de disfrutar...

[Mayra Morales · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ingratitud o el cómo los detalles de la vida ordinaria convierten a una hija en ingrata

[Sara-Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautifully written books I've read in a while. A must

[Gideon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anything written from the perspective of a dead person, I love. This was no exception.

[La gata lectora · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Querida mamá, voy a morir por ti. Sin embargo te he aguardado con la esperanza de cambiar de idea. He esperado mucho tiempo. Una ligera caricia de tu mano fuerte podría salvarme. O una sonrisa suave, pues tú sonríes muy poco, mamá...».⁣
⁣
A través de la historia desgarradora de una chica de 25 años que tiene una relación muy tóxica e insana con su madre y de su suicidio como venganza hacia su progenitora, la autora nos deja entrever la triste historia que viven muchas mujeres en China, obligadas a seguir la tradición de la sociedad y los mandatos de su propia familia, eternamente infantilizadas y dependientes de sus padres o maridos. ⁣
⁣
La chica que nos habla ya está muerta. Y desde ese limbo ve y recuerda. Todo gira en torno a su madre 'amante y opresora' y al dolor que esconde ella, 'ingrata' hija, que solo quiere ser libre, pero no puede escapar del vínculo animal que las une, aplastando todo su dolor tras un muro de enorme y profundo odio. ⁣
⁣
Creo que es imposible no devorar el libro de un tirón. Breve, duro, conciso. Es brutal la dinámica con su madre, cómo ésta la culpabiliza, manipula, chantajea... Y a la vez no le deja salir de su vida, porque es parte de sus entrañas.⁣

[Sheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ingratitude: A Novel (Ying Chen) is a gripping tale told from the perspective of young Yan-Zi. She is bitter towards her mother, suffering years of emotional abuse. As Yan-Zi plots her suicide, to show the final act of defiance towards her mother, one is able to feel the emotional pain and burdens she carries. Well written, Ingratitude shows the struggle between mother and daughter and the ultimate fate of this(sad) lack of communication between the two. Excellent read.

[Shelley Diamond · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is disturbing but realistic in showing how it feels to be emotionally neglected by your parents. The woman keeps trying to win her parents' love, despite the obvious hopelessness of that effort. It's a sad story but all too common, with heartbreaking results.

The only good thing that might come from this book is if someone reading it realizes that she must give up on parents like that, and live for herself.... Loyalty is over-rated and often leads to unnecessary suffering....

[Dee · Rating 2 out of 5]

A young Chinese woman commits suicide to spite her mother and the afterlife is not quite what she expects.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

La prémisse était vraiment intéressante mais l'ensemble m'a déçue un peu.

[Yuyu_reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

C'est magnifiquement écrit et poétique. J'ai beaucoup aimé l'aspect philosophique de ce roman et que ça traite d'une dure réalité d'une manière particulièrement douce.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relation mère-fille complexe présentant de manière assez violente cette filiation définit par l’amour-haine. Portrait nuancé de la chine contemporaine.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty dark book. Didn't enjoy it very much.

[Megan Gendron · Rating 5 out of 5]

« On ne pouvait pas venir au monde seul. On ne pouvait pas exister sans parents. Une personne sans parents est misérable comme un peuple sans histoire. »

J’ai TELLEMENT aimé 😭 ce livre fait mal, il vient nous chercher jusque dans les entrailles, il nous condamne à ressentir l’enfermement, la douleur et l’anxiété vécu par la narratrice. Je me sens toute croche… C’est donc l’histoire d’une jeune femme, en Chine, et de sa relation hyper tumultueuse avec sa mère. La narratrice, qui s’est suicidée, oscille entre le passé et son présent en tant que témoin des retombées de sa mort. Sa mère contrôle tous ses faits et gestes, exerce un contrôle complet sur elle, et la trouve tellement « ingrate » de vouloir avoir sa propre vie, de vouloir être sa propre personne, alors que c’est elle qui l’a mis au monde. Le lien mère-fille est tellement fort ici, mais aussi tellement épuisant, anxiogène, lourd. On sent l’amour entre elles, mais aussi tous les non-dits, la rancœur, la souffrance.
C’est vraiment vraiment vraiment triste. J’ai dû m’y prendre à deux fois pour le lire: la première fois était juste trop un mauvais moment dans ma vie pour que je le lise. Je suis néanmoins contente de l’avoir fait, c’est vraiment une belle découverte et un coup de cœur 🫶🏻 et quelle belle prose! Wow!!!

[Susan Chow-Dukhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twenty-five year old Yan-Zi is dead. This first person narrative follows the thoughts of the spirit of Yan-Zi during her funeral and her reminiscence of the events of her life, her plans to commit suicide, and her subsequent death. Born into a traditional Chinese family, where the parents raise their children in an atmosphere of emotional detachment, Yan-Zi is considered to be an ungrateful daughter by her mother. Her plans for the perfect suicide is intended to expose her mother as being a less than perfect mother. She feels that her mother has been flaunting her mothering skills by the rules which have been rigorously applied to correct Yan-Zi's perverse nature.
This book touches an emotional chord for readers that had a distance relationship with their parents, and were brought up feeling that their parents were always disappointed with their behaviours, appearance, decisions and life choices. The mental abuse and lack of affection directed towards their children can have a long-term impact as the children becomes adults. Some remain emotionally scarred for their entire life and are hesitant to expose their vulnerability to others.

[Rebekah · Rating 3 out of 5]

To die young is to violate the divine law. It's more immoral than showing your legs.

Goodreads recommended this book to me while I was reading Last Words from Montmarte, and on the surface there strong similarities - both are about the suicide of a young Chinese woman. The character in Last Words is in Paris, and the author of Ingratitude, Ying Chen, wrote this book in French. Ingratitude is about a young woman who kills herself to basically get back at her mother for stifling her and dominating her life, and she narrates the story from beyond the grave, going back and forth between how the family reacts after the death and what led up to the suicide.

This book is very easy to read and uses a very simple form. The writing isn't very difficult to grasp. However, I feel like this detached style was a bit of a double edged sword because I didn't feel very emotional despite understanding why Yan Zi feels the need to kill herself. It ended up being a bit of a mediocre reading experience.

[Tati :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Se permiten juzgar a los muertos. (...) La muerte se ha convertido en una cosa cualquiera a la que atribuyen un precio que varía según su humor."

"Se ponen de acuerdo para el patético placer de rebajarse un poco, cuando el cuerpo de otro desaparece por completo. La superioridad de estar vivo bien merece unos instantes de humildad ante los muertos. Pero hay límites para todo. (...) Por eso, al salir del cementerio, cada cual se seca las mejillas, recupera la sangre fría y saluda con educación."

críticas a la sociedad con sus respectivas reglas, al amor y el casamiento por conveniencia y a la muerte la cual también tiene sus reglas según las creencias.
La búsqueda de libertad a través de la muerte, y la imposibilidad de lograr esto. La vida en sociedad atrapa y asfixia a la protagonista que nunca se siente libre. Al final, te deja pensando ¿somos realmente libres? ¿hasta que punto?

[mimi key · Rating 3 out of 5]

Novela corta infestada de una rabia y una frustración muy agria y violenta. Siento que me ha faltado algo en el fluir de la prosa, quizás algo más de impulso o de afectación. Todo y con eso, la reflexión sobre la relación madre - hija me ha parecido terriblemente sincera y cruel, una visión muy lúcida y terrible, y por ello honesta tanto en el amor viciado como en el odio sencillo. No hay exageración o corrección a la hora de expresar el terror de la individualidad cuando la sobreprotección ha sido tan asfixiante, ni del deseo frustrado de ser una 'persona' en un ambiente que empuja casi a la fusión del todo.

[Charles Godbout · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'Ingratitude de Ying Chen est un récit poignant qui explore les conséquences néfastes des traditions et normes sociétales rigides. Ce livre décrit comment ces contraintes peuvent mener à l'oppression et à l'aliénation, offrant une perspective critique sur l'impact de la conformité culturelle.

[Lune · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un livre troublant et fort, qui relate la relation possessive d'une mère envers sa fille. L'écriture de l'autrice est superbe, dans le sens où elle colle parfaitement à l'ambiance globale du roman. Un livre très prenant !

[l · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why is French literature so obnoxious. Juvenilia.

[Floriane · Rating 5 out of 5]

LA sincérité totale est le luxe des forts.
Une lecture forte, puissante, amère, entre haine et amour inconditionnel sur les relations mère-fille.

[Maude · Rating 2 out of 5]

*1.5 stars*. Well written but a depressing story none the less.