Word: guanglin
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...Much of this gratuitous misery can be read as the blackest of comedy, but there are plenty of other dimensions to Yu's writing besides gallows humor. Narrated in the first person by Sun Guanglin, a sensitive and lonesome soul who's trying to make sense of his bizarre childhood, Cries in the Drizzle stitches together a patchwork of genres - from pastoral vignettes to sweaty cinematic action sequences (a teen threatens to kill his hostage girlfriend with a meat cleaver); disconsolate philosophical observations ("Our lives, after all, are not rooted in the soil as much as they are rooted...
...protagonist's parents give him away when he's 6 to a burly army officer and his sickly wife who can't have kids and need help around the house with chores. (Why his parents are so willing to get rid of him is never entirely clear.) In adolescence, Guanglin makes it to college in Beijing, but through no help of his original family members, to whom he returns when his adoptive father kills himself. Things only get worse, and the lachrymose novel quickly becomes a caustic indictment of Confucian familial ideals, an exposé of the "deadness of family...
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