Word: brothers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...family. Yang Peiyuan, the older twin by half an hour, is to return to their hometown and join the communists. Yang Peiji, the younger twin, is to go south to join the Kuomintang (KMT) and fight in their Nationalist army. The train is about to leave. Peiji tells his brother to try to persuade their father to escape to Hong Kong. They hug, and Peiyuan boards the train...
...plot is not black and white; despite his ordeals, Peiyuan is more self-assured, more confident of his Chinese identity. His brother Peiji, the eminent achiever, broadcasts insecurity and a trace of guilt at the good life he has enjoyed. Peiyuan is resigned to China's failings. Peiji has indigestion from Taiwan's success. Tell their family story, and you also start to tell the story of China over the past 50 years, with all its contradictions, betrayals and unburied ghosts. Confucian thought has always seen the family as a model of the state. Obedience to the father...
After leaving his brother at the railway station, Peiji fought with the KMT and set about building a career for himself in Chiang Kai-shek's military. He spent two years in cadet school, and by 1960 he was promoted to captain. The same year he got married, but when his Taiwanese-born wife suggested they buy a house, Peiji said no. "At that time we all thought we were going back to China. What point in buying a house in Taiwan?" he says, laughing. "It was not until 1975, when Chiang Kai-shek died, that we changed our views...
...simply made up. She was not uneducated. She was sent to boarding school. Her father was indeed engaged in a long struggle to keep from being dispossessed of his land--not by rich ladinos (Guatemalans of European descent), as she claims, but by his in-laws. Nor was her brother Petrocinio burned to death by the government death squads...
...Star Called Henry (Viking; 343 pages; $24.95), Roddy Doyle's new novel about the birth of the modern Irish nation, begins with the vivid miseries of its hero, young Henry Smart, who is named for a dead brother whom his grieving mother can't forget. The time is the turn of the century, a dreary hiatus between a past of colonial starvation and a future of war and revolution. Henry's father, a one-legged Dublin bully-boy who free-lances as the doorman at a brothel, can't support the family, so Henry runs wild, stealing from shopkeepers, sleeping...