In the Lap of the Gods

by Li Miao Lovett

Overview

"An important, even invaluable book, a moving farewell to the old, more humane way of life as China and all the world become technologized and globalized."—Maxine Hong Kingston

A dam rises on the Yangtze, uprooting a million lives in a government-made, modern environmental and human rights disaster, and a poor salvager who has lost everything finds an abandoned baby girl. A tale of defiance, of a lost man finding his place—and a new kind of love—in modern China, and of a rich man reclaiming his soul and the woman he loved before the revolution tore them apart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935248132
Publisher:	Leapfrog Press
Publication date:	11/02/2010
Series:	LeapLit
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Li Miao Lovett began contributing to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001. She has published articles and stories in Narrative Magazine, Earth Island Journal, KQED Perspectives, and others. Her literary work has won awards in both fiction and nonfiction.

Editorial Reviews

Lovett's evocative novel portrays widower Liu Renfu, a day laborer turned scrounger, caught in the Yangtze dam breach, part of the Chinese government's relocation plan. Liu braves the terrifying waters, alone, after losing his family, searching for items to sell. "The river showed no mercy. It swallowed the landscape in slow, heaving gulps. The surrounding fields had all but disappeared, digested over the course of the day in a pulpy mass." In his search, Liu discovers an abandoned infant and saves the child from drowning. The baby, who he names Rose, becomes his charge, despite Liu's meager circumstances. In his scavenging, Liu also uncovers an item that is precious to Fang Shuping, a successful local businessman whose yearning for the past forces him to confront contemporary injustice altering his life in the process. Lovett's complex tale of displacement and hardship, contrasting modern China with its past, highlights the human spirit's capacity for renewal. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"A political opera [with] indelible characters."—Kirkus

From the Publisher

In her first novel, Lovett chronicles the human cost of building China's Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

Liu earns a meager livelihood scavenging the villages abandoned as the Yangtze rises. After finding a forsaken baby girl at the river's edge, he approaches Fang, an entrepreneur who offers to help sell the baby to an orphanage. At the last minute Liu, whose beloved wife died while pregnant two years earlier, decides to keep the baby he calls Rose. With the help of an elderly neighbor, Liu learns to care for Rose. He also begins to court a waitress, Mei Ling, at the newly thriving restaurant of his friend Tai. Liu, Tai and Mei Ling all come from villages swept away by the dam's creation. Mei Ling left her parents once they were relocated rather than be forced into an arranged marriage, but as a good daughter she continues to send money home. Tai plays matchmaker, throwing Liu and Mei Ling together as they work to open Tai's new, larger restaurant. Mei Ling accepts Liu's marriage proposal, but has difficulty adjusting to her new domestic life, in particular to the demands of feisty little Rose. When a job opportunity occurs in another city, she takes it and finds herself falling in love with her boss. Meanwhile Fang, who spent his youth in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, hears from an old friend, Longshan, whose sister Sulin remains the lost love of Fang's life. Rose is Sulin's granddaughter. Fang approaches Liu to sell the child back shortly after Mei Ling asks for a divorce. Afraid of losing Rose and assuming he's already lost Mei Ling, Liu leaves town with Rose to start a new life elsewhere without leaving a forwarding address. Fang's love and submerged idealism mingle as he involves himself in Longshan and Sulin's fight to receive compensation for their forced relocation.

A political opera written in an often flat, journalistic style, but Fang and Mei Ling are indelible characters.

Kirkus Reviews