Category — The Bitter Sea

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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