Charles Li’s ‘The Bitter Sea’
While an enjoyable read, it wasn’t until I reached the final pages of Charles Li’s “The Bitter Sea” that the novel evoked any real feeling in me, it was the humanity shown in his father that ultimately enabled me to better appreciate the work as a whole, which was a personal attempt to describe Li’s own journey for his father’s affection.
Often jumping from place to place and time to time, one constant throughout Li’s narrative was that he kept moving along, and spent limited time on describing each part of his childhood. While there may be some criticism of the tempo he set throughout, I found it quite a good representation of his childhood as a whole: getting acclimated to a certain situation only to leave it for an entirely new one soon after; we, as the readers often felt the same thing during certain points of the book, as often just as we were getting accustomed to a certain environment, Li propelled the storyline in another direction. Had it been a work of fiction, this may not have been appropriate, but since the work was non-fiction, and Charles Li is the best person to write about the life of Charles Li, I have no problems with the direction he took the novel in.
An argument many will try to make is that by separating the book into distinctly different and separate parts, Li created too much of a disconnect between each phase of his life. On the other hand, I found it more so a unique touch rather than a weakness of the book; because no matter how you looked at it, each past ‘life’ of Li contributed to how he presently lived; the attitude he had while in the slums of the Nanjing was undoubtedly present in him many years later even when he was tutoring as a young adult. Certainly there were points in the book in which Li could have finessed his change in settings and subplots, but the abruptness that was very often apparent was fitting for the childhood in which he led. From the start of the story it was obvious, Li had no intention of documenting a ‘sob story’ so when moments of emotional importance arose, to me, they felt much more genuine than if they had been seen throughout the story all along.
