THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 10, 1996 TAG: 9601100037
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MARI LONANO
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
BRUCE WEIGL'S poem ``Amnesia'' opens with the lines, ``If there was a world more disturbing than this/ where black clouds bowed down and swallowed you whole/. . . you don't remember it.''
If there is a world more disturbing than Su Tong's fictional depiction in ``Rice'' (William Morrow, 266 pp., $23) of one man's hate and revenge in pre-Communist China, I don't remember it, nor do I want to.
Five Dragons has had to flee from the floods, poverty and degradation of his hometown of Maple-Poplar Village in famine-stricken China in the 1930s and is unable to forget, never mind forgive, the want and violence he witnessed in his youth.
When he arrives in North City to look for work and rice, the central metaphor of the novel, he is treated harshly by ``wharf-rats,'' the violent street thugs who rule the rice docks. Having gone without food or shelter for days, Five Dragons is a man on the edge of insanity.
The novel develops the theme of rice as savior and power as we watch Five Dragons move into the Feng family, the owners of the Great Swan Rice Emporium, and its sordid life. His bitterness is like that of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's ``Heart of Darkness''; nothing will satiate it.
Five Dragons insinuates his way into the Feng family, abuses the patriarch's daughters and finally becomes the proprietor of the emporium. But the journey from his first day of working at the emporium to the end of the novel is vicious and desolate. Five Dragons owns a hunger that nothing will satisfy: not the daughters, not power and not even all of the rice in the world.
While the events that Su Tong depicts in the novel are unrelentingly violent and horrifying, his language, as translated by Howard Goldblatt, is as powerful and evocative as poetry. When Five Dragons leaves Maple-Poplar Village, he takes the train toward the north and the city where he believes he will find a new life. Su Tong writes:
``Sundown. A freight train from the north comes to a rocking halt at the old depot. A young man, jolted awake, feels the train shudder to a screeching stop; lumps of coal shift noisily under him as he squints into the blinding depot lights; people are running up and down the platform, which is blurred by steam and the settling darkness; there are shadows all around; some stilled, others restive.''
But Five Dragons' spirit cannot find solace. Throughout his life, after destroying anyone who questions his power or his choices, he hears that train and dreams of the day he can return to Maple-Poplar Village with as much rice as his money will buy. Rice is power; it is wealth: ``In his mind he had never left the inside of a railroad car. It bounced and it shook, until he experienced a sudden attack of light-headedness. . . .''
Five Dragons' journey to his village takes most of his life. And it is a journey into darkness. In Five Dragons' eyes, ``Hatred was everlasting: like a steel implement, it survived fire, pounding, grinding and corrosion. Once a tool, always a tool. Hatred would live in his heart for all time.''
We see what is inside Five Dragons' heart and want to feel compassion; in spite of what he does to others, it is clear that something so deep and so wrong has destroyed any soul Five Dragons may have once possessed. But if we give in to the compassion, we are guilty of giving into evil. MEMO: Mari LoNano teaches English at Norfolk Academy and lives in
Williamsburg.
by CNB