From Amazon.com
With
Sons of Heaven, Terrence Cheng has crafted a personal and insightful look into the Tiananmen Square massacre and its participants. Inspired by the famous footage of the unknown man who stopped the tanks, Cheng creates a conjectural history for him in the character of Xiao-Di, an intelligent, opinionated young man raised by his grandparents in Beijing. The father of Xiao-Di's girlfriend, a supervisor at the employment bureau, helps him receive a scholarship to study at Cornell. After ending the relationship and returning to Beijing, Xiao-Di finds himself blacklisted from employment. Idealistic and angry, he joins the growing student movement centered in Tiananmen. Cheng intersects the narrative with Xiao-Di's brother Lu, a bitter, vicious soldier later ordered to capture him, and the character of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, combining history and speculation in an attempt to understand the violent response to the protests. With patience and understatement, Cheng offers a sympathetic glimpse into each man's inner life and motivations, revealing their shared experiences and tragedies. The author humanizes these stories with just the right amount of quietly stunning detail in his assured, elegant prose, such as the "sparkles over the Mao pins" on Lu's boyhood uniform, or in Deng's evocative dreams:
Here is a wolf-faced Mao, lean and sharp-eyed, his hair long and wavy framing the sides of his face. He smokes cigarette after cigarette, blowing clouds into the air of the blue night.… Mao stands with a rifle and blasts a shot into the night, and in the purple drop of evening stars shatter and rocket the sky.
A haunting, rare book, Sons of Heaven communicates the basic humanity of these characters and the true cost of their conflict. --Ross Doll
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Centering around the Tiananmen Square massacre and its aftermath, this remarkably structured and textured debut epic seeks to attach a face to the mysterious man who, by stepping in front of the rolling army tanks, became the most recognizable symbol of the massacres. Cheng succeeds in his endeavor, and in the process he gives China a face as well¢one so vivid and provocative it's hard to walk away without a fresh impression of the massacre, the 13 years since, and modern-day China in general. Three months before the massacre, Xiao-Di returns to China after spending four years at Cornell University, where he fell in love with a blonde American girl who left him upon graduation. But he has tasted freedom and his return to China is turbulent. He cannot find work. He grapples with the way the masses adhere to tradition and respect authority. He lives with his grandparents (his parents are dead) and when not at home feeling angry and confused, he is out with his friend Wong, bleakly contemplating the future. Then, through the eyes of president Deng Xiaoping, we enter Tiananmen Square, where students have begun protesting. Cheng successfully humanizes the person he has called a complicated man, driven by a genuine passion to create a better society for the Chinese people. Xiao-Di soon finds himself impulsively partaking in a hunger strike and, before long, facing down a tank. Complicating matters is his brother, Lu, a Chinese soldier who is sent with a unit to find Xiao-Di. Through the brothers and their grandparents, a multifaceted and sophisticated portrait of the Chinese people is rendered. This is a rare find: historical and political without being pedantic, and briskly entertaining without being cheap, simplistic or contrived.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
