Liu, Sola 1955-

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LIU, Sola 1955-

PERSONAL: Born 1955, in Beijing, China. Education: Graduated from Central Conservatory of Music.

ADDRESSES: Agent—University of Hawaii Press, 2840 Kolowalu St., Honolulu, HI 96822-1888.

CAREER: Composer and performer, working in Taiwan, Hong Kong, London, and New York; leader of reggae group Sola; associated with recording company Also Productions. Recordings include June Snow, Also Productions, 1999; China Collage, Haunts, Blues from the East, and Sola and Friends.

AWARDS, HONORS: Chinese National Novella Award, 1988, for Ni bie wu xuanze.

WRITINGS:

Ni bie wu xuanze (novel; title means "You Have No Choice"), [China], 1984.

Chaos and All That (novella),[Hong Kong,] 1991, translated by Richard King, University of Hawaii Press (Honolulu, HI), 1994.

Also author of short-story collection translated as Blue Sky Green Sea and Other Stories.

SIDELIGHTS: A classically trained composer turned rock-and-roller and novelist, Liu Sola is a product of China's Cultural Revolution, which originated in the mid-1960s out of Chairman Mao Zedong's conviction that the Chinese Communist Party had come to resemble the imperialist elite the Communists had worked to overthrow in 1949. China's so-called "intellectuals" were targeted; many were forced into rural labor, had their homes confiscated, and were publicly beaten and even killed by members of the Red Guard, a squad of militarized young people, often teenagers. Liu grew up in a political environment. Her uncle, Liu Zhidan, was a revolutionary hero who died a martyr's death in 1936; her father was a high-ranking Party member until he and Liu's mother were exiled to a rural pig farm. "Since 1976 Chinese scholars and artists have been reexamining the nation's history, struggling to understand how the Cultural Revolution could have happened," wrote Dwight St. John for Southern Humanities Review. One of those artists, St. John observed, is expatriate Liu, whose novella Chaos and All That "oscillates between a first-person account of the Cultural Revolution by a girl who becomes a Red Guard, and a third-person account of her life."

Protagonist Huang Haha serves as Liu's alter-ego; she is a character who grows up in a privileged family of dedicated Communists. Huang escapes to London, where she expects to find freedom and happiness; instead, she finds herself reflecting on the land and family she left behind. But even these reflections are treated with "scatological satire and nostalgia, an incongruous brew," in St. John's view. The issue of strong language came up in D. E. Pollard's review of the novella for China Review International. "The literature written by children of urban cadres who were rusticated in the Cultural Revolution exhibits a fascination with excrement, and Chaos is no exception," Pollard stated. The book's translation ably expresses those notions, but "the problem comes with swearwords, which relate as is universally the case to excretion and sex, but have their local variations." Another critic, World Literature Today's Ihab Hassan, found "no false notes here, no cracks in the authorial voice, as the skipping narrative … counterpoints the gongs of history with familial murmurs and the flute melodies of the heart."

Chaos and All That was not Liu's first book to reach the West via translation; her Blue Sky Green Sea and Other Stories was reviewed by Jeffrey Kinkley, who commented in Choice that the author presents a "seemingly very Westernized, introspective, even self-centered first-person narratives to unmask social hypocrisy." Kinkley added that despite the author's frequent references to Western music, "the social world she penetrates is quite Chinese—one in which rock culture represents a learned, 'high' philosophical version of young people's idealism. It is youth that is romantic—suicidal as well as committed—and old folk who are the cynics."

As a musician, Liu has lived and traveled to numerous places and has devoted herself to reggae, rock, blues, and soul music. When asked by Alexa Olesen in an online Virtual China interview what motivates the composer/author, Liu unhesitatingly gave the answer, "my mother." During the Cultural Revolution the Red Guard "formed a special group in the Central Party to deal with my parents, but they fought against these people," Liu explained. "My Mom, she was so tough. You know, she can remember exactly what Marx and Lenin and Mao Zedong said in the original books." The image of her mother standing up to the Communist Party "gave me lots of strength," Liu continued. "I think some of it came to me. But it's really only later that I realized that."