Cai Feng is a twenty-two year-old studying for China’s university entrance exams after failing year after year since he first sat for the exams at the age of eighteen. Most of his high school classmates are graduating from university and starting professional jobs, yet Feng continues to disappoint his parents and their expectations for their only child.
Yang Huang’s latest novel, My Good Son, is set in 1990 Yangzhou. As one may infer from the title, the story tells of a relationship between parents and their son. Yet Huang juxtaposes Feng’s story with another contentious family drama: an American student named Jude and his father and step-mother back in Texas.
Feng and Jude know one another through Little Ye, a young cook employed at Feng’s continuation school, a place where high school graduates study for the college entrance exams after failing the first round. When Feng’s parents, tailors by the name of Cai, meet Jude, they devise a back-up plan for their son in case he fails his exams again: obtaining sponsorship from the American Jude for Feng to study in the US.
Jude has his own issues with his father and step-mother back in Texas. He’s gay, they don’t know, and he needs a way to break the news. Jude’s father has been asking to visit his son in Yangzhou for the last three years, so Jude sees this as a good opportunity to come out and promote Feng as a worthy student to sponsor.
The backdrop of 1990 Yangzhou provides Huang with a suitable setting in which to tell this story about parental expectations. The university entrance exams had only been reinstated the previous decade and only a small fraction of Chinese students were able to test into a good university then. Both students and parents felt enormous pressure when it came to these entrance exams.
Likewise, Jude’s angst about coming out to his father and step-mother work better in a 1990 setting. Both young men feel held back by their parents and rely on the kindness of others to help them come to terms with these obstacles in their family relations.
Throughout the story, Feng hints at his displeasure in taking and retaking the entrance exams when he only wants to work in fashion design at his parents’ tailoring shop.
All my life I have wanted to explore and make my own mistakes, but you never let me. You mapped out a straight path for me to enter the university. I hate that. I didn’t want to go to a university until Little Ye broke up with me. I would’ve been happy going to a trade school four years ago.
He and Jude at first are adversaries—at odds with one another over Little Ye—yet they work together to stand up to their parents.
My Good Son moves along at a crisp pace and the author’s simple style and tone match the period in which she has set the story, a period in which China and the United States were not as entwined as they are now. Huang’s story shows on a human scale the interdependence of Chinese and Americans, a relationship that has grown in many ways since the 1990s. Despite all the current political talk about the US and China decoupling from these connections, the two countries, like the characters in Huang’s story, are reliant upon one another and are here to stay.