Family sagas have always been the genre that most resonates with me. There’s something about the chorus of voices, the interweaving of intertwining and intersecting stories and themes, that can overwhelm me like a raging river. I love losing myself in that powerful chaos, that emotional richness that only great family narratives can offer. The story of the Li family is one of them: it shocks and heals, just as any saga worthy of the name should.
Set in rural and intensely patriarchal China, Sheng Keyi’s Wild Growth follows a time span from 1911 to the present day, through the eyes of Li Xiaohan, the youngest Li, a journalist determined to break the silence of a family as solid as a rock.
The Li family is, in fact, like an unshakeable stone: a grandfather who is a poet and a gambler, two parents worn down by farm work and the importance of personal success over that of others, four siblings who couldn’t be more different. The novel follows the course of their lives, and from this juxtaposition of portraits arises the chaos of unspoken feelings, controlled violence, dull pain, and repressed love. A human comedy in fragments.
The Chinese cultural and social status quo, rooted in Confucian thought, looms large throughout the narrative. The dynamics between father and son, like those between husbands and wives, along with the respect owed to elders, are played out throughout the novel in obligations and strict silences, with no concessions to declared love. Everything is duty, and the ethics of feelings seem to vanish in crude, clear-cut, and merciless glances and gestures. Keyi does not spare his readers descriptions of cruel deaths and punishments, of domestic and state violence.
However, this violent patriarchal immobility, typical of the countryside and the heir to Maoism’s rural re-education, began to crack with the arrival of the 1980s. China’s economic expansion led to an ever-increasing depopulation of rural areas, toward the dream of a better life, toward the unattainable cities. The protagonist and narrator, Xiaohan, is one of the symbols of this rupture. She is the first and only sister to graduate, to move to the city, and to find work as a journalist. The long-desired city life, however, brings with it the arbitrary power and greed, and escape does not guarantee salvation—only new, more sophisticated constraints.
Xiaohan stubbornly pursues her career and ends up working for an investigative journalism: hers is a social commitment aimed at seeking the truth and uncovering abuses of power. A risky pursuit, this one, which repeatedly leads the protagonist into dangerous situations and the center of scandals. The newspaper—which actually existed—was censored, as was this book, in China, for its uncomfortable themes: forced abortions, patriarchy, violence, blood, injustice, age-old rituals, and censorship itself. But it is precisely by recounting these shadowy areas that the author opens wounds and paths to healing. Sheng Keyi uses words as weapons: “Words are like a cartridge of bullets.” It is not gentle writing: it is sharp, ironic, and violent, like the China she depicts.
My advice is to let yourself be pierced and then embraced by the Li family. The course of their family river is one you never forget. Traveling it has been a journey of growth for me. Wild growth.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sheng Keyi, Crescita selvaggia, Fazi, Roma, 2022
Original edition: Ye Man Sheng Zhang