South of the Yangtze starts with the protagonist, Qian Yinan, taking the high-speed train through the landscape of Jiangnan (“South of the Yangtze River”) with her American husband. Now in her mid-thirties, Yinan recalls her first trip along the same route in the late 1980s, as well as her Shanghai childhood with her “historical counter-revolutionary” grandfather, semi-literate grandmother, philosophy professor father and former “red guard” mother.
Later in school, while receiving a nationalist education and witnessing the booming market economy, she becomes close to Jie, a classmate who aspires to join the Communist Party. And a few months before the new millennium, Yinan finds herself trapped in a secret love affair with her Mandarin-speaking high school teacher, who was once an activist during the political turmoil of 1989.
In the midst of these formative relationships, Yinan contemplates the impact of the nation’s ideology, tradition and even its written language, and pushes the boundaries of thinking which are restrained by these tools. Later, she decides to write and read in English as much as possible, and eventually leaves her home town. But what is the price to pay when she adopts a new language and a new way of thinking? After the SARS epidemic in 2003, would her reunion with a psychologically troubled Chinese American friend bring Yinan real hope for love, understanding and peace? While this thoughtful novel is a meditation on both physical migration and migration between languages, it also provides a moving portrait of China’s only child generation.
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