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Crystal Wedding
Yang Tianyi is a “leftover woman” and under pressure to find a husband. She is attractive and intelligent but knows little of the world, and finally makes a disastrous marriage to a man, Wang Lian. At the end of the 1980s, in Tiananmen Square, she meets her love Hua Zheng again. However, after the political turmoil, Hua Zheng is framed as one of the perpetrators of the disturbances, and is sentenced to prison. Set against the background of China’s turbulent 1980s and 1990s, Crystal Wedding is a novel of searing emotional honesty. (Winner of English Pen Translates Award).
304 pages, Hardcover
Published April 15, 2016
3 people are currently reading
161 people want to read
About the author
Xu Xiaobin
15 books4 followersXu Xiaobin 徐小斌 is a prolific writer of novels, novellas, essays, and prose, as well as scripts for television and film. She was born in 1953 into an intellectual family in Beijing and is a member of the China’s Writers Association. She spent nine years in the countryside and at a factory during the Cultural Revolution until 1978 when she entered the Chinese University of Central Finance just after universities had reopened and entrance examinations were held nation wide. She began publishing her writings in 1981. Currently she works as a staff screenplay writer at China’s Television Production Center. She has published numerous fictions, novellas and collections of prose.
Her novel Feathered Serpent (Yushe 羽蛇) was published in English in 2010, and in 2011 also, the translation of her novel Dunhuang Dreams (Dunhuang yimeng 敦煌遗梦) was released. She regularly participates in international conferences on women’s writing, and was awarded the Lu Xun Prize for Literature for her 1998 novella Pisces (Shuangyu xingzuo 雙魚星座). She is also highly regarded as a painter and is skilled in the folk art of paper engraving.
Her novel Feathered Serpent (Yushe 羽蛇) was published in English in 2010, and in 2011 also, the translation of her novel Dunhuang Dreams (Dunhuang yimeng 敦煌遗梦) was released. She regularly participates in international conferences on women’s writing, and was awarded the Lu Xun Prize for Literature for her 1998 novella Pisces (Shuangyu xingzuo 雙魚星座). She is also highly regarded as a painter and is skilled in the folk art of paper engraving.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 31, 2017
2.5 stars, rounded up
Crystal Wedding is basically the story of an unhappy marriage. Tianyi, at 30, is considered to be a "leftover woman" and marries an unsuitable man, bearing a child very soon afterwards. The book flits between her marriage and the men she has known before her marriage, as well as her life as a writer.
A lot of the time I found this book rather dull and plodding. I am not sure if this is partly the translation - the prose never really flowed for me. However, it was certainly an interesting look at the effect that China's political troubles had on the sexuality of its young people. Tianyi is beautiful, intelligent and capable and yet is sexually very naive and inhibited.
An interesting book but it just never really hooked me. (less)
Crystal Wedding is basically the story of an unhappy marriage. Tianyi, at 30, is considered to be a "leftover woman" and marries an unsuitable man, bearing a child very soon afterwards. The book flits between her marriage and the men she has known before her marriage, as well as her life as a writer.
A lot of the time I found this book rather dull and plodding. I am not sure if this is partly the translation - the prose never really flowed for me. However, it was certainly an interesting look at the effect that China's political troubles had on the sexuality of its young people. Tianyi is beautiful, intelligent and capable and yet is sexually very naive and inhibited.
An interesting book but it just never really hooked me. (less)
August 31, 2017
2.5 stars, rounded up
Crystal Wedding is basically the story of an unhappy marriage. Tianyi, at 30, is considered to be a "leftover woman" and marries an unsuitable man, bearing a child very soon afterwards. The book flits between her marriage and the men she has known before her marriage, as well as her life as a writer.
A lot of the time I found this book rather dull and plodding. I am not sure if this is partly the translation - the prose never really flowed for me. However, it was certainly an interesting look at the effect that China's political troubles had on the sexuality of its young people. Tianyi is beautiful, intelligent and capable and yet is sexually very naive and inhibited.
An interesting book but it just never really hooked me.
Crystal Wedding is basically the story of an unhappy marriage. Tianyi, at 30, is considered to be a "leftover woman" and marries an unsuitable man, bearing a child very soon afterwards. The book flits between her marriage and the men she has known before her marriage, as well as her life as a writer.
A lot of the time I found this book rather dull and plodding. I am not sure if this is partly the translation - the prose never really flowed for me. However, it was certainly an interesting look at the effect that China's political troubles had on the sexuality of its young people. Tianyi is beautiful, intelligent and capable and yet is sexually very naive and inhibited.
An interesting book but it just never really hooked me.
May 9, 2016
Xu's book unprecedentedly exposes the complex of a woman when she has to confront her becoming a mother. For the protagonist Tianyi, the unconditional love toward her son does not eclipse her feeling that her becoming a mother corrupts her God-beloved body and private life, and vice versa. Tianyi's acrid becoming and self-confrontation urge us to reflect back into the constructed "natural" responsibility of a "mother" and the socio-cultural factors--such as the lack of knowledge of sex and contraception in the post-revolutionary China (even now!), the deeply-entrenched gender inequality, women's toils prescribed by the male-centric familial structure--that render becoming a mother so much unprepared and unbearable.
June 9, 2017
As good as Wild Swans
Yes it really is. It has the same wonderful combination of vibrancy and truth as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. Here again is the hard-headed open-eyed observation of horrific suffering brought about by human cruelty and blindness entwined with the beautiful endurance and faith of the human spirit – the human spirits depicted in both books. If anything I enjoyed Crystal Wedding even more because it was able to take us so deep into just one person’s experience. By the end I knew – I felt I really knew - Tianyi, the ‘left-over’ woman, intimately in all her strengths and weaknesses as they came out and developed over the years, her loves and joys , including the little beautiful ones, and her skills and laughter and sufferings too. She is introduced to us so ingeniously too: at first we meet her as just an ordinary young girl (true enough), then gradually, in the unfolding narrative and a series of subtle skillful flashbacks, we grow to know her, as indeed Tianyi comes to know herself, as the talented tough and caring woman she becomes amidst a series of impossibly conflicting pressures. It is incredibly moving.
I loved all the little touches, that was what made it sing – the loving accounts, and so many of them, of food and cooking; the delight and touch of a child, a lover - and, in time, the disappointment of both; the look and sound of things; cycling through the streets; the feel of the air and of nature. I could, in a way, envisage them pictured in Chinese delicate drawings. The author knows intimately what she is talking about and it shows.
Even apart from the beautiful writing of the novel itself the book is worth buying for its Preface – a searingly truthful account by the author based on her personal experience, not only of the horrific physical exploitation of the women of China during the cultural revolution but, even worse many would say, of the hidden and ineradicable cruelty that followed: their sexual repression – in other words the repression and forbidding of love itself. A destruction. How could we grasp that if not in the life of one woman, just one woman, one who had to live with and endure that hardihood? We learn it for ourselves through the eyes of the novelist, clearly at least in part autobiographical (what truly great novel is not?).
In the crucial, cruel, unflinching final paragraphs Tianyi’s life is seen to have been for nothing – friends once loved and cherished found to be full of flaws: admired colleagues to be betrayers, no longer admirable or to be trusted; a dear sister ‘morphed into a frustrated spinster’. She reflects, and with truth:
‘What were human beings when measured against infinity? They were so small, rudderless, fickle, anguished, stressed, depressed, deviant, useless, vacillating, acquiescent, self-betraying, vile … She was all of these things herself’. And all her friends too, even her dear love who, sentimentally, we had hoped to see as her redeemer.
Then continue to the end of the book.
I am not in a position to judge the accuracy of the translation but it seems to me to admirably match what comes through so movingly as the poetry and sensitivity of the original and, both, to fully deserve all their accolades and more.
A most wonderful, unsparing and uplifting book, not one ever to forget.
Yes it really is. It has the same wonderful combination of vibrancy and truth as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. Here again is the hard-headed open-eyed observation of horrific suffering brought about by human cruelty and blindness entwined with the beautiful endurance and faith of the human spirit – the human spirits depicted in both books. If anything I enjoyed Crystal Wedding even more because it was able to take us so deep into just one person’s experience. By the end I knew – I felt I really knew - Tianyi, the ‘left-over’ woman, intimately in all her strengths and weaknesses as they came out and developed over the years, her loves and joys , including the little beautiful ones, and her skills and laughter and sufferings too. She is introduced to us so ingeniously too: at first we meet her as just an ordinary young girl (true enough), then gradually, in the unfolding narrative and a series of subtle skillful flashbacks, we grow to know her, as indeed Tianyi comes to know herself, as the talented tough and caring woman she becomes amidst a series of impossibly conflicting pressures. It is incredibly moving.
I loved all the little touches, that was what made it sing – the loving accounts, and so many of them, of food and cooking; the delight and touch of a child, a lover - and, in time, the disappointment of both; the look and sound of things; cycling through the streets; the feel of the air and of nature. I could, in a way, envisage them pictured in Chinese delicate drawings. The author knows intimately what she is talking about and it shows.
Even apart from the beautiful writing of the novel itself the book is worth buying for its Preface – a searingly truthful account by the author based on her personal experience, not only of the horrific physical exploitation of the women of China during the cultural revolution but, even worse many would say, of the hidden and ineradicable cruelty that followed: their sexual repression – in other words the repression and forbidding of love itself. A destruction. How could we grasp that if not in the life of one woman, just one woman, one who had to live with and endure that hardihood? We learn it for ourselves through the eyes of the novelist, clearly at least in part autobiographical (what truly great novel is not?).
In the crucial, cruel, unflinching final paragraphs Tianyi’s life is seen to have been for nothing – friends once loved and cherished found to be full of flaws: admired colleagues to be betrayers, no longer admirable or to be trusted; a dear sister ‘morphed into a frustrated spinster’. She reflects, and with truth:
‘What were human beings when measured against infinity? They were so small, rudderless, fickle, anguished, stressed, depressed, deviant, useless, vacillating, acquiescent, self-betraying, vile … She was all of these things herself’. And all her friends too, even her dear love who, sentimentally, we had hoped to see as her redeemer.
Then continue to the end of the book.
I am not in a position to judge the accuracy of the translation but it seems to me to admirably match what comes through so movingly as the poetry and sensitivity of the original and, both, to fully deserve all their accolades and more.
A most wonderful, unsparing and uplifting book, not one ever to forget.
May 17, 2017
It was Wang Zengqi, I think, who once declared there is little to no boundary between fiction and prose essay. This is certainly the case with a whole generation of women writers who turned to a mixed prose style to speak out on topics like their intellectual ambitions, their emotional needs, the details of their marriages and even sexual experiences. Such things were shocking in the 1980s in China, but widely commercialized during a period of 'privacy fever' in the 1990s. Wang Lingzhen discusses Chen Ran, Lin Bai and few others in her academic account of this history, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China. Here we have another 'privacy' writer, Xu Xiaobin. Interestingly, the original Chinese manuscript has not been published in China, no doubt because protagonist Yang Tianyi's physical and intellectual growth occur against the backdrop of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests -- one scene even features Beijing under lockdown during one of those fateful summer nights 28 years ago. Xu Xiaobin also points out, later in the book, "that total amnesia had afflicted an entire people. The Chinese were so apathetic that they had simply decided not to pass judgment..."
Such sentiments cannot be published officially in China, though they are widely held.
Taken as a sequence of tableaux vivants, detailed and historically accurate portraits of Beijing intellectuals coming of age in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Xu Xiaobin's work does have some interest. It's refreshingly direct about sex, and further features essayistic flourishes on a writer's intellectual ambitions. There's just too little movement here. Portrait after staid portrait appears where good story telling prescribes increase and decrease in conflicts, internal and interpersonal. While protagonist Yang Tianyi does face intense conflicts with herself and within her marriage, these conflicts do not build and resolve so much as throb in the background while faces and places and some very lovely meals scroll by. After the fourteenth chapter, we realize that, in fact, that's it. She's not going to explode, giving it all up to find something new. Nor is she going to learn to love her family -- and why should she, they are exquisitely execrable, every one. So...we plod along, reading Kundera and burning for a decent fuck, though it never comes.
Such sentiments cannot be published officially in China, though they are widely held.
Taken as a sequence of tableaux vivants, detailed and historically accurate portraits of Beijing intellectuals coming of age in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Xu Xiaobin's work does have some interest. It's refreshingly direct about sex, and further features essayistic flourishes on a writer's intellectual ambitions. There's just too little movement here. Portrait after staid portrait appears where good story telling prescribes increase and decrease in conflicts, internal and interpersonal. While protagonist Yang Tianyi does face intense conflicts with herself and within her marriage, these conflicts do not build and resolve so much as throb in the background while faces and places and some very lovely meals scroll by. After the fourteenth chapter, we realize that, in fact, that's it. She's not going to explode, giving it all up to find something new. Nor is she going to learn to love her family -- and why should she, they are exquisitely execrable, every one. So...we plod along, reading Kundera and burning for a decent fuck, though it never comes.
December 21, 2017
Crystal Wedding is an extraordinary and unusual story, (for a Western reader anyhow), and it is told very well. This novel is perfect for readers who relished Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help or Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
Reviewed on The BookBlast® Diary 2016
Reviewed on The BookBlast® Diary 2016
April 30, 2024
This book started out very promising, delivering on important themes and topics that I haven't read about in chinese context prior. Unfortunately, it stayed (imo) very surface level.
I am happy I managed to finish reading it, tho admittedly some parts was skimmed through in quick haste as they felt boring/ non engaging.
I am happy I managed to finish reading it, tho admittedly some parts was skimmed through in quick haste as they felt boring/ non engaging.
October 30, 2023
Depressing :(
May 6, 2016
I really enjoyed reading Crystal Wedding! What an extraordinary story - the heroine had so many challenging experiences, and she was a strong woman whilst also vulnerable in a very believable way. Many insights into the recent history of China too..
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews