This was an absolutely, magnificent, heartbreaking, beautiful story from Zoe S. Roy.

I fell in love with Nina and became impassioned with her life, her story, her search and quest for meaning in a world that can be so unforgiving and cruel, but also so loving, warm and welcoming.

I highly, highly recommend this book if you haven’t read it already.

I am so thankful to Ms. Roy for gifting me with this book and also for the incredible kindness she has shown me in email correspondence. None of this has affected my review in any way, shape or form. ( )

Calls Across the Pacific revolves around a disillusioned young woman who manages a dangerous escape in 1969 across the border in the midst of the tumultuous Communist Chinese Cultural Revolution, leaving her boyfriend behind who chooses to fight for the Communist cause. She makes it first to America and later Canada, learning how to adapt to the confusing cultural shock of a new life in a new land. She searches for truth and understanding amongst different ideology and changing values to discover what freedom really means. After many years, she returns to China to visit family and old friends, most of whom assumed she had died when she disappeared. When later she was also seeking others to write about their stories, she gets detained and put into a dreaded reeducation concentration camp where her very freedom now is in question. What struck me most in the story was the statement, "It seemed the word ‘revolution’ covered all the violence and crime, but punished innocence. A real criminal could go free during the revolution. A victim deserved death because her grandparents committed a so-called political crime." These crimes were such as being previously owing land or expressing opinions "opposite to that of Mao’s ruling class". I happen to live in a free democracy that Communists would call an imperialistic nation. Though in view of the many changes in recent events here, I wonder about our own parallels to this story. I observe in my beloved country unprecedented political oppression and social upheaval. With all this from our own radical movement incited by outside elements and freedoms slipping away, will our destination be the same as the reality that the story depicts which the main character so desperately sought to escape? It's a sobering thought. ( )

For those who read Roy’s earlier collection of short stories, Butterfly Tears, the character of Nina Huang will be familiar. Nina’s birth coincided with the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China and her story tells of the real-life impact of growing up and coming of age under Mao’s dictatorship. It also describes her escape to North America to find freedom, the draw of her friends and family who remain in China and her desire to record and tell the history of her generation.

As with her other books, Roy skillfully creates images of everyday life in China such as cooking a meal or riding a train. She infuses those events with a sense of a peaceful joy of living despite the ever-present fear of saying or doing something that might attract the attention of a government official. For those readers who do not have an immigrant or refugee history, we gain insight into the personal and family tragedies that can result from living in a repressive dictatorship. Lives are lost and people are imprisoned for things that may be held in high regard elsewhere such as owning land or being highly educated.

Themes related to intercultural issues and becoming accustomed to the culture and climate of a new country are central to Calls Across the Pacific as well. In her new home in North America, Nina finds the framework for making moral and personal decisions she developed when growing up in China is at odds with the culture of her new home. She arrived in her new home with beliefs based on a melding of traditional Chinese culture and Mao’s communist teachings. It was interesting to see how Nina gradually reformulated her sense-making system so that she felt both less at odds with the culture of her new home and more self-directing of her life. We also witness the struggle Nina encounters when she returns to China and experiences an internal conflict when she realizes that her new home has changed her in ways that are not acceptable in the land of her birth.

Calls Across the Pacific is not just a historical fiction novel but it also describes the two love relationships Nina lost and a relationship with a caring man who went on to be her fiancée. While these love stories have their touching moments, they are not the strongest, richest or best-written elements in the book. Upon further reflection, the love stories still served a useful purpose in the novel. Rather than being a distraction from the main story of Nina’s struggle with escaping from China and then recovering from her traumatic upbringing, they add further texture and nuance which helps to demonstrate the contrasting cultures and the pull of the past in Nina’s life.

This novel is an excellent read for those who are interested in women’s literature and the socio-cultural lives of political refugees. ( )

Disclosure: An electronic copy of this book was provided by the author in exchange for review.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Roy has tackled an ambitious storyline here, dealing with the massive changes in China during Mao’s Cultural revolution and its immediate aftermath. Doing justice to this huge canvas could have taken easily a thousand pages as individual stories unfolded, exploring the privations and heroism of the scores of people whose experiences are retold here.

But that’s not the book Roy has chosen to write.

Her main character, Nina Huang, wants to escape the rural “re-education camp” to which she has been assigned because of her family’s association with western organizations. Her youthful sweetheart, also tarred with the brush of parental crimes, seeks to leave the country and make his bones as a revolutionary in the North Vietnamese army. Unable to come to an agreement to walk the same path, Nina escapes to Hong Kong, then makes her way to Canada and, ultimately, the state of Maine.

All along the way, things fall neatly into place for her. She escapes a Chinese patrol boat while her fleeing rowboat is within swimming distance of Hong Kong’s shore, and the first house at which she seeks shelter welcomes her with open arms. An application for political asylum floats right through, and a Catholic-run immigrant aid organization gets her established and backs her education in North America. She studies language and political science, meets and breaks up with her first lover and ends up with a journalist who supports her burgeoning writing career.

In the course of researching a book (the idea of which just suddenly appears without much apparent reason), she makes two trips back to China, where she collects dozens of stories from past acquaintances (who spring up in one fortuitous coincidence after another) and – after the only really suspenseful incident in the book – is reunited with her now-fiancee and (one assumes) goes on to publish her book and live happily ever after.

It’s not a *bad* book. The basic idea is fascinating, and the stories coming from her Chinese peers are horrifying and heartbreaking. But they are presented without emotion and without context other than that of a country in chaos, and pulled down by a pedantic presentation full of counter-revolutionary morality tales, often spoken in wooden dialogue.

The young man denied an education because of his father’s political crimes, the young woman who was raped and then punished as a criminal, the devoted couple who must divorce to enable their children to overcome the disgrace of a parent – none of these people become more than cardboard characters. Each deserves a full story of their own, but each is reduced to a hundred-word “this awful thing happened” tale which Nina dutifully records and occasionally compares to her own life experience.

As with her later work, “Spinster Kang”, “Calls Across the Pacific” suffers from an overload of tell and not nearly enough show. The language is kept simple and free of emotion. Neither of the two romantic relationships Nina enters into feels real, and the reader knows the people involved love each other only because Roy tells us they do.

Readers interested in an overview of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution may find the background stories of interest. Readers interested in characters whose fates they can come to care about and whose struggles for success they want to share, will have to keep looking. ( )

Calls Across the Pacific tells the story of a girl pursuing the promise of freedom in the West during the time of the oppressive cultural revolution in China. The book provides critical historical context as China moves into an uncertain and challenging future. A great read! ( )