LETTERS TO LITTLE COMRADE

In Woo’s novel, a young woman attempts to break free from her life under communist rule.

Little Comrade is unfulfilled. The young woman works 12 hours a day on a factory assembly line in the People’s Republic of Qina. She sleeps in a bunk house with other workers, including her best friend, Bo Bo, who teases her about her lack of a boyfriend. Little Comrade claims she’ll find one soon, but she isn’t very taken with her options. Indeed, she feels ambivalent about much of her existence—a perspective that puts her at odds with the state-mandated patriotism she should be feeling. To highlight this contradiction, the novel takes the form of a pamphlet put out by the Qinese Bureau of Public Affairs. The second-person narration addresses Little Comrade as a hypothetical stand-in for an entire generation of women: “You want to move to a nicer place like this ‘America’ you have heard so much about…maybe you have always felt this way, ever since you were a baby girl in your father’s village, before you got a job at the factory in the big city. Do not fret, this book can help you overcome that tiresome and unwanted desire.” The guide advises Little Comrade on how to navigate her relationships, check her ambitions, and learn to appreciate her motherland, but can she suppress her dreams of a better life in America without killing the best part of herself? Woo’s prose is deceptively nimble. While the format could easily feel gimmicky, it proves incredibly adaptive, capturing moments of beauty and sorrow in addition to the frequent flourishes of humor: “The inhabitants are still living there, growing vegetables in Styrofoam boxes…old grannies and grandpas with their teeth missing, with shrunken, shriveled bodies. You, too, if you are lucky, dear Little Comrade, will look like them one day.” It’s a short, devastating read, one that will stick with the reader long after it’s over.

An inventive, incisive novel about the psychology of modern China.