In one story, a man without medical training, pressed into service as a camp doctor, relates his dismay at watching a starving patient die after the only available remedy for the critically ill, glucose injections, fails. “Don’t blame yourself,” a qualified doctor tells him. “It was not your fault. We had brought him back to life twice already. His time had come. Nobody could have saved him.”
While the stories contain no sugarcoating and are frequently grim in theme, the reader consistently encounters the stubborn persistence of humanity’s best qualities. In the title story, a young woman travels to the labor camp to visit her husband, only to learn from reluctant fellow inmates that he has just died. In the face of threats from camp authorities, she collects his remains from a shallow grave and carries them home for proper burial.
Most moving of all is The Love Story of Li Xiangnian, a narrative about the persecution of a young man and the persistence of his ardor for his girlfriend. Li escapes from detention to reunite with her, only to be arrested again. Their touching reunion many years later, after the woman is married, would not be out of place in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.
RSS