Peacock Cries

By Hong Ying

2004

First Published

2.98

Average Rating

292

Number of Pages

8H55M

Audio Length

Hong Ying surpasses her previous novel, The Art of Love, with a novel of heightened political and sexual -tension set around the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. The largest construction project in the history of China, the dam opens in June 2004. Its controversial -reservoir will cut the famous Gorge to one third of its height and submerge the whole area, the cradle of Chinese civilization for three millennia. When Beijing scientist Liu goes to visit her husband, the director of the dam project, she discovers he is being unfaithful and flees to her hometown. Taking refuge with her Auntie Chen, Liu is told by Chen how her mother gave birth to her in the midst of political turmoil and how both mother and daughter nearly died for lack of help. Chen’s own son, Yueming, was born at the same time as Liu and is now a painter and key figure in a local cult bent on sabotaging the dam’s construction. Finding themselves drawn together, Liu and Yueming realize they are a reincarnation of the prostitute Red Lotus and a Buddhist priest, whose affair led to their vilification and whose naked crucifixion is described in graphic sexual detail. With the souls of Red Lotus and the priest cementing the couple’s attachment, Liu’s decision to join Yueming in protesting against the dam means she must ultimately face imprisonment. Peacock Cries boldly tackles the subjects of rein-carnation and spiritual quest in the face of economic development. Hong Ying was born in Chingqing in 1962 into a sailor’s family. She was the sixth child in a family of eight and endured great poverty and hunger as a child during the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution.

Avg Rating

2.98

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

11%

4 STARS

17%

3 STARS

35%

2 STARS

34%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Hong Ying

Author · 7 books

Hong Ying was born in Chongqing in 1962, towards the end of the Great Leap Forward. She began to write at eighteen, leaving home shortly afterwards to spend the next ten years moving around China, exploring her voice as a writer via poems and short stories. After brief periods of study at the Lu Xun Academy in Beijing and Shanghai’s Fudan University, Hong Ying moved to London in 1991 where she as writer. She returned to Beijing in 2000. Best known in English for the novels K: the Art of Love, Summer of Betrayal, Peacock Cries, and her autobiography Daughter of the River, Hong Ying has been published in twenty- nineteen languages and has appeared on the bestseller lists of numerous countries, she won the Prize of Rome for K: the Art of Love in 2005 and many of her books have been or are now in the process of being turned into television series and films. Hong Ying has long been interested in the stories of homosexuals living in China, a theme explored here and in her short story collection, A Lipstick Called Red Pepper: Fiction About Gay and Lesbian Love in China 1993-1998. In her work, she likes to focus on human stories, hardship and history. Her responsibility as a writer, she believes, is in part to explore the lives of marginalised groups struggling for visibility – and for compassion – in contemporary China. Chinese Profile: 虹影