[英文简介：]
[[[[[[[[[[[[[ "The Affairs" is a Chinese language romantic campus novel, chronicling the stories of three modern women a Beijing-born college youth met while studying in Southern California during the fall of 1982, and the kindred spirits he found among the three extraordinary high-spirited women. It uses a subtle and delicate first-person narrative style, combined with streams of consciousness storytelling techniques, characterized by the French Existentialist novelists, piercing characters’ psychological underlying through exploring and examining the underworking of human nature. The book expands to explore generational impacts through narratives depicting the toils and human sufferings of generations before them, spanning three continents, across time and space, which is said akin to a Chinese version of David Mitchell’s book “Cloud Atlas”, a breakthrough in contemporary Chinese literature.
At the core of the book, is a coming-of-age story of a bright-eyed 18 year old Chinese boy born in the aftermath of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. In Los Angeles, at poor-side he first met a beautiful blonde woman by the name of Shanna, for whom he developed lurid fantasies, and soon carried out a brief but romantic and intimate love affair. At a Hollywood-hills nightclub, he met an Iranian young woman by the name of Navida, with whom he developed a bond and a deep Platonic relationship. Born under the reign and heydays of Pahlavi regime, Navida left parents behind, to escape Tehran engulfed in the American Embassy hostage crisis, and face an utterly different modern world. Meanwhile on campus, a Chinese princeling by the name of Sue, born into an elite family behind the red-walled Beijing leadership compound was also pursuing her own dreams and romance. The three distinctively different women, born into varied social statuses and circumstances, continents and cultures apart, became female symbols and microcosms of a bygone era in a world standing still at a moment in time. Through the tales of their lives and generations exceeding them, the book attempts to depict how our lives are interconnected. As explored in the theory of “Six Degrees of Separation” human lives across continents, time and space, are often related through labyrinths of mysterious means and ways, however, as human beings walk through life they are utterly oblivious to the present and clear signs that connect them, and events poised to impact and shape their common destiny.
In the 20th Century, the human race witnessed the bloodbath on Omaha Beach of Normandy during World War II, the Battle of Pork Chop Hill during the Korean War and through the napalm-inflamed jungles during the Vietnam War. As the world turns, years later, descendants of those once bitter enemies became classmates, friends, lovers and even soul-mates. Their lives and destinies became forever intertwined, across ethnic, linguistic and cultural boundaries. If in the 20th Century humanity dedicated itself to bitter rivalry for deeply divided ideals and worldviews; in the 21st Century and beyond, humanity may dedicate itself to the pursuit of mutual understanding and common good for the sake of survival of entire human species on this fragile planet. ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]
