THREE SISTERS

Oppression and discrimination - Chinese novelist Bi Feiyu captures it all too well through the lives of three ill-fated Wang sisters growing up during the Cultural Revolution.

The story may be a figment of Bi's imagination, but it is unsettlingly real for those who lived in that era.

It centres around Yumi, Yuxiu and Yuyang and how they make use of, respectively, their steely character, charm and diligence to get ahead in life despite their fallen circumstances.

The fall from grace happens when their philandering party secretary father, Wang Lianfang, is caught in bed with a soldier's wife (which was, at that time, a heinous crime).

He loses his position, and with it, his power and wealth, and decides to become a painter. The household is left in the charge of Yuxiu, the oldest of his seven daughters. He also has a son.


The book is divided into three chapters, named after the three sisters, who happen to be the ones with the strongest personalities. Their lives are transformed into a keen observation of Chinese society as it was then, where political affiliation was important and the status of a woman depended on that of her father or husband.

Yumi, whose arranged marriage is ruined because of her father's fall from grace, steels herself and marries a man old enough to be her father but who is able to raise the status of her family.

The once proud and strong-willed woman now has to keep her head down and be seen and not heard, 'as was expected from the obedient young wife of an older man'.

Yuxiu, loved for her beautiful deep, double eyelids (considered rare and precious by the Chinese), is raped, as villagers pay the Wang family back for their father's misadventures.

From being confident and coquettish, she becomes withdrawn and unable to find love because 'where could you find anyone willing to eat sugar cane that someone else had already chewed on?'

Yuyang, intelligent and determined, manages to get a place in a school in town but finds out that village life was much simpler when she is roped into the school's security team and is expected to rat on her classmates.

One quibble is the translation. The author's humour and colloquialisms are hard to re-create, and some time was spent (I must admit), wondering what 'piss pot' and 's*** can' could mean in Chinese, with reference to a slur for a rape victim.

Despite these inadequacies in language, Three Sisters is a book that entertains the reader with a vivid acount of day-to-day life in rural China and you glean snippets of what life for a female must have been like.

As the narrator puts it: 'To him (Wang), women were external factors, like farmland, temperature and soil condition, while a man's seed was the essential ingredient. Good seed produced boys; bad seed produced girls. Although he'd never admit it, when he looked at his seven daughters, his self-esteem suffered.'

These insights also enrage because you know such injustices happened not so long ago and may still be happening now. With a heady mix of humour, tragedy and the mundane, Three Sisters makes this reader wish that a novel was written about each of the sisters instead.

Download from Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu