Forbidden City

Starred review from February 14, 2022
Hua’s provocative latest (after A River of Stars) follows a bold and shrewd woman as she navigates China’s political scene amid the Cultural Revolution. Mei Xiang is almost 16 when she trades a long-kept secret for a place in Chairman Mao’s troupe—an excellent opportunity to serve the party’s interests while escaping a dull, inevitable life filled with field work and famine. Her ambition and dreams of becoming a model revolutionary help her catch the Chairman’s eye and keep him interested long enough to incite the jealousy of the other recruits and even of his wife, long accustomed to turning a blind eye to her husband’s many indiscretions. At first, Mei relishes being the Chairman’s lover, his confidant, and even his pawn in the schemes he orchestrates to triumph over his political rivals. But eventually, she sees the deceit in their relationship and understands heroes aren’t always what they seem (“He had rewritten my history. To be everything to everyone, I’d become no one,” she reflects). Hua masterly presents Mei’s attempts to leave the Lake Palaces with their “power, secrecy, and isolation” behind as she processes her trauma. This finds a brilliant new perspective on familiar material via its story of a young woman’s brush with power. It’s magnificent. Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Folio Literary Management.

March 15, 2022
In her first historical novel, Hua (A River of Stars, 2018) draws on 20-plus years of experience as a journalist covering Asia and the diaspora to reclaim a few of the "millions of impoverished women who have shaped China in their own ways yet remain absent from the country's official narrative." In 1965, Mei Xiang, 15, is chosen for a prominent dance troupe. As the youngest daughter in a village family, she's learned to silently observe others, a skill that, ironically, gets her noticed. When Mei travels to Beijing to "serve the Party," she lands in the deified chairman's bed the very first night. "Peasant" she may be, but Mei holds the pedophilic septuagenarian's attention longer than most. She's coached to challenge the subversive president, who is clearly attempting to usurp the chairman's power with capitalist threats; her success could influence the country's future. Addressing an unknown "you" as San Francisco's Chinatown cheers the chairman's 1976 death, Mei reveals "a reckoning that's long overdue." Hua's 15-year journey of research and writing deftly proves that "fiction flourishes where the official record ends."

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April 1, 2022
Hua's ambitious second novel explores China's Cultural Revolution through the eyes of an idealistic teenage girl. On the day of Mao Zedong's death in 1976, Mei Xiang, a waitress in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant, recalls the incredible journey that took her from a remote, impoverished village to the heart of political power in Communist China. When Secretary Sun, a Party official, arrives in the summer of 1965 to recruit young girls for mysterious duties in the capital, the patriotic 15-year-old Mei is so eager to become a model revolutionary that she subtly blackmails the village headman into guaranteeing her selection. Arriving at Beijing's walled Lake Palaces, once home to emperors and now the Chairman's residence, Mei soon learns from Teacher Fan that her job will be to dance with the Party elites. That first evening she attracts the Chairman's attention, earning the enmity of another ambitious girl, Midnight Chang. The quick-witted Mei soon becomes the Chairman's lover and confidante; when he recruits her to trick and undermine his political rival, she seizes the opportunity for revolutionary action with fervor. But her doubts grow as Mei observes the harrowing violence and brutality sweeping the country. Inspired by documentary footage of Mao surrounded by adoring young women and drawing on the life of his personal secretary, Zhang Yufeng, Hua vividly captures the cult of personality that enabled the manipulation of girls like Mei. But her narrative pace is surprisingly slow; most of the action takes place within the isolated confines of the Lake Palaces, where Mei obsesses over her rivalries with Midnight Chang and Madame, the Chairman's wife. Mei's narrow viewpoint also limits the novel's emotional impact, as she remains detached from the traumatic events of the Cultural Revolution until the contrived climax. Though disappointing in its execution, this well-researched book addresses a momentous period rarely covered in fiction.

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