Category — Critics’ Corner

When I first heard we had to read The Bitter Sea, which documents the author’s life in China from WWII to the Communist takeover, I was slightly disappointed. My last summer assignment was to read the Joy Luck Club; parts of that book took place at the same time and place as Charles N. Li’s book. As it turns out the difference between the two books startled me. While The Joy Luck Club was a work of fiction, The Bitter Sea was non-fiction. The Bitter Sea included details about the author’s time in China that were sometimes gruesome, heartwarming, and altogether unbelievable, while the Joy Luck Club , as a work of fiction, was missing some of the details that made China during that time come alive for me. Charles N. Li never tried to glorify Chinese culture or denounce it. He gave his honest opinion about what he saw, trying to see the situation from a variety of perspectives.

What is most interesting about The Bitter Sea is the relationship between Charles and his father. It turns out the relationships between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club were very different than the relationship between the Chinese father and his son in The Bitter Sea. Charles father seemed to be trapped in the traditions that come with Chinese Confucianism, while his son, trying to understand his father’s decisions, tries to forge his own destiny in a changing world where traditions are dying.  Charles admires his father and responds warmly when they start a relationship, but the relationship is complicated. They have a falling out when it becomes clear that Charles’ father used him in order to try to gain political favor in Communist China. Even through all of this, after obtaining a scholarship to Bowdoin College, Charles and his father rekindled their relationship.  The book really shows the strong familial bonds, that are part of Chinese culture, remain strong even through the worst of times.

The summer going into junior year of high school, I took up my first job so I could make that cash money flow. Except, the job wasn’t as glamorous as I had imagined. I somehow got a job as a “councelor” at an all-Asian Educational Camp. Or rather, Chinese summer school, starring the one and only non-Asian counselor, ME. I did not speak the language(s), I did not look like anyone they had ever seen before, and I was chosen to govern over a sea of 30-odd six-year-old kids took kindly to me.

Weaving and dodging through my classes, teaching English (and Spanish, that was interesting), Math and Science, I picked up on quite a few cultural differences. I forgot completely about this summer until reading The Bitter Sea, which instantly threw me back in the first paragraph.

Also, it helped me better understand where my students had been coming from, and their home life. I never really understood the strong ties between the family members, and how incredibly different the priorities are in Asian culture than in western.

Despite choppy narrative which may be excused by the author’s foreign nature, the book had a lot to teach me. It was difficult to get through, but I am very glad that I did.

Although this is not something I am exactly eager to admit, I am extremely closed-minded when it comes to the literature I choose to read. The only books I will read willingly, with a few strange exceptions, are always about Asian culture. So I was thrilled when, for the first time ever, a book assigned to me was one I would pick up off the shelf myself.

I began reading The Bitter Sea with high expectations. I was eager to read about Charles N. Li’s coming of age and the experiences he had in China’s most tumultuous time period. I was ready for excitement, shocks, and drama. What I ended up reading was none of that, yet in a way it was one of the most touching novels I have read in a long time.

During the initial discussion of The Bitter Sea, many criticized the novel for having a detached, unemotional narration throughout. Although I agree that there was a lack of excitement in the novel that many American memoirs have, I felt that there was an incredible amount of emotion in the story. From Charles desperately, and almost subconsciously, looking for a place to belong in the slums of Nanjing, to his first real confrontation with his father and the consequences it has on their relationship, I could feel his struggle throughout. I have found that in many Asian cultures, emotions are typically suppressed for the sake of the family or community. Therefore, the subtle rebellions and emotional confessions by Charles have even more significance.

The Bitter Sea does not provide a great life lesson or spiritual awakening. It does, however, cause the reader to think about their family, their role in society, and the way anyone can, if they try hard enough, accomplish their dreams. And that, to me, is far more important than excitement and drama.

Charles Li’s, The Bitter Sea, talks about Li’s growth in China with himself, his father, and his horizons. He grew up through the Communist takeover in China near World War II and his childhood was a tough time for him. Until he was 5, he pretty much was restrained and confined within the walls of his father’s mansion in Nanjing. He was prevented from seeing the outside world for a majority of his childhood and Li even goes to say how hating this confinement was his first childhood memory. It was a struggle living there for him because him and his father were never on the same page and much of his life circled around pleasing his father.

I think this confinement for Li is a major contributor to why that happiest time of his life was spent while living in the slums. When first forced into the slums, Li’s mother tells him and his siblings how their father constructed a sheltered world for all of them. She pretty much tells them that they were spoiled living in the mansion and now they’re getting a taste of how life really is. They’ll “have to learn to cope with squalor, poverty, and hunger.” But unlike his siblings, Li felt free for once in his life. He found happiness in the slums and that is something I truly admire about Charles Li. He made the best out of what he had. He admired the world around him and that’s all he wanted as a kid. He wanted to know what was beyond the tall brick walls of his mansion in Nanjing. I actually believe that his confinement early in life molded him into what he became later on in life. I think it made him appreciate the little things in life more and not worry about what people think of him. He always strived for his father’s approval and acceptance but I think after living in the slums and experiencing happiness, he slowly learned to accept himself and not worry about what other people thought of him.

I admire Charles Li’s outlook on the world and how he built his own life single handedly. He had a pretty miserable childhood and he worked to make a life for himself in America, eventually settling differences with his father in the end. When he steps foot on the plane to head to America, I think he reflects on the life he’s lived and the life he’s moving on to. With everything he’s gone through with his father, Communist takeover, and just his life in general, emotions set in and I think that is sort of a “bitter” feeling. Although he’s happy that he’s expanding his horizons and taking a step forward in life, I think he also feels a bit of an undying connection with China that he’s not completely ready to let go of and that he’ll miss.

The Bitter Sea by Charles N. Li is a captivating memoir that tells the story of his growing up in a China during the Communist takeover. Firstly, I would like to mention that the title confused me at first – I could not see a connection to the story itself. There was no bitter sea mentioned at all throughout the entire memoir and I did not have a clue as to what it meant until after I finished reading it. Charles N. Li did an excellent job in selecting the title because it gives the reader room to hypothesize and think about what is really meant. Every reader could have his own interpretation of what the title means to him or her. To me, the bitter sea is the sea of bitter tears that have been cried during the period in China that Li describes in his memoir.

Most of Li’s story is very dismal and, oftentimes, I questioned whether or not I wanted to flip the page and keep reading. The little bits of humor that he threw in here and there make the reader question whether or not Li is exaggerating the stories he tells. It is hard to imagine a person who is honestly able to talk about getting frostbite and endless diseases (that could make the strongest of humans suffer horrible pains and death) and later in his memoir look back at those times and claim they were the best ones of his life. Part of reading a memoir includes having only one view of what went on, and I understand that, but most authors admit that their memory could be fooling them or that some parts are exaggerated on purpose. Li does not do so, telling the reader that he, in fact, recollects all the events in their entirety and tells nothing but the whole truth.

What would touch any reader’s heart, however, is Li’s detailed relationship with his father. He takes us down the road of their relationship and we feel every bump and ridge, every high and low, that Li felt. Having a first-hand account of what the relationship meant to Charles and how he felt gave the reader his own sense of connection with the family. When he embraces his father for the first time, we the readers feel genuinely happy for him. When we discover that Li’s father betrayed him by sending him into a communist camp only to “test the waters,” we feel just as devastated and shocked as he was. He truly does an excellent job at taking us on this roller coaster ride that he calls his life, as though we were sitting right there in the front row with him.

Much like a roller coaster, we are kept in suspense of how the story will end until the big drop. In Li’s memoir, he keeps the action rising higher and higher until the last few pages of the memoir where everything gets resolved. One would anticipate an abrupt ending, but Li ended his epic story within a couple of pages and left the reader satisfied (and partially relieved) of how things concluded. Overall – it was a mighty fantastic read that left the reader with a great sense of fulfillment and a deeper insight into the history of China.

Li wrote a powerful memoir and I was able to connect to him in many ways. Certain aspects of his life are common through out the Chinese community. His traditional father is something that I shared in common with him. His father did not value a close bond with his son and at his best his father would be nonchalant and at his worse he would put down Li. Li’s response was admirable and he did not allows his father’s critique and brutality get to him. Li persevered by entering his own world and attempted to obtain his father’s love at almost any means possible. His attempt seemed to be successful when him and his father connected at a political level, which all shattered once again. His relationship with his father is a rollercoaster of a ride with many ups and down, but it finally would end with an up.

Much of my life mimicked Li’s life. I as well desperately tried to obtain the approval of not just one parent but both my mother and father. It would seem that no matter how well I performed it just was not enough. They wanted more from me and pushed me to my limits. It was not until my later years that they gradually started to accept me for what I was. They let go of some of their tradition and embraced a more familial tie with me. It was this idea that the parents should not communicate with their children because parents function at another strata from their children. However, my parents soon let this go when I embraced them about their philosophy.

The Bitter Sea is an enticing read for those who can connect to Li. Much of his life and ordeals can be applied to anyone who has or is going through a struggle. Reading about his pain and jubilance brings hope to the hearts of many people such as myself. Although there may be many more themes to this novel, the message I got from Li was to be strong and endure no matter how much “bitterness” may exist in your life. In the end the bitterness we experience make the small things much more enjoyable.

Charles N. Li wrote a powerful memoir displaying the difficulties he experienced from childhood to adulthood, from his family’s extreme downgrade from a wealthy family to an impoverished family living in the slums of Nanjing, to being denied of entering college due to his father’s status in China. Li demonstrated his emotional struggles throughout his book, from his separation from his nanny, his attempt to become closer to his distant mother, to his constant strive for acceptance by his father.

Li’s memoir seemed incomplete at various points in the book; in many instances, Li jumped from one event to another without any subtle transition. His division of the book into five parts helped aid the reader in terms of figuring out Li’s whereabouts, but other than that, the reader was left struggling to figure out what other events happened between every division of the book.

However, I still thoroughly enjoyed reading Li’s memoir since his detailing for what was mentioned was well-written; I enjoyed reading about the adventures he had with his friends in Nanjing, the extermination of the Four Pests in his reform school, as well as his reunion with his father at the end of the book. Although English was not his first language, Li managed to pull off successfully an intriguing memoir of his journey of how he became who he is today.

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.

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