A literature-focused coming-of-age story reminiscent of Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, George Lee’s debut novel, Dancing in the River, chronicles the formative years of a boy named Little Bright who grows up during the Cultural Revolution in the Hubei countryside near the Yangtze River.
Little Bright spends his days at school, learning by repetition. But when he’s eleven, he discovers banned books at the local junkyard, just before the books are about to be pulped. His mother’s colleague, Uncle Wu, worked at the junkyard and had no clue that this “junk” would change Little Bright’s life.
That year, at age eleven, I discovered the pleasure of reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. But books were as rare as meat. Almost all books—other than those of Chairman Mao—were regarded as poisonous plants. To utter the word “library” was as horrifying as the word “graveyard.” There was one exception, though. Tons of seized poisonous plants (meaning books) were piled up in the town’s only junk recycling depot, which became my summer library.
Some of Little Bright’s early favorites (as indeed were Lee’s; the story is informed by the author’s own experience) included books from Dickens, as well as Robinson Crusoe, and Arabian Nights. But it was Sherlock Holmes that taught him how to think.
… inductive reasoning left me spellbound. I was excited; I wanted to unearth all the mysteries facing me and my life.
The Cultural Revolution not just banned the study of English, but was a time of betrayal as both subject and perpetrator.
Little Bright also experiences the ups and downs of first love and shows his appreciation for his grandmother, his de facto parent after his parents are sent away for re-education. He learns from his grandmother as much as he learns from books.
Grandma was an angelic bird appointed by fate to show me the true meaning of life. When the night was dark, she had not seen the blackness but the radiance of the stars. She accepted the whole of her life, a realm beyond joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, a place where she beheld truth and found freedom.
The title of the book comes from the Yangtze River, which Lee writes about throughout his story.
Despite the many vicissitudes of our world, the river continued to listen and watch, amassing its own memories. With voices speaking aloud and running low, emotions buried in its waves, it presents a thousand faces: unpredictable, capricious and stubborn. Sometimes, it is peaceful and quiet. Sometimes, it is upset and angry. Other times, it is tearful and in pain.
And towards the end of the novel, Little Bright thinks back on the river as he reflects on his childhood, teenage years, and university and graduate school years: