FARAWAY

A Taiwanese writer navigates hospital bureaucracy when his father falls ill while vacationing in China.

The narrator and author share a name and profession, and an afterword makes clear that the book, which first appeared in 2003, reflects real events in Lo’s life. As the story opens, the narrator learns that his father has suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while visiting his original hometown in China and has been hospitalized in critical condition. One of the many Chinese who fled Mao’s Communist forces in 1949, he abandoned his first wife and son and started a new family in Taiwan. Unsettled history—China claims sovereignty over Taiwan while the latter says it’s an independent nation—has left the narrator with a divided clan, and his mind often drifts among thoughts of kinship, fatherhood, his own toddler son, and a wife almost nine months pregnant. The narrator and his mother travel to Jiujiang First People’s Hospital, where they settle into the day-to-day routine of visiting a patient, with the usual anxiety, uncertainty, and monotony. The run-down facility sparks in the narrator some typical Taiwanese disdain over China’s development. In “despair at the Kafka’s Castle that was the gap between Taiwan and the mainland,” he scrambles to get his father back to Taiwan, where everything is better and you don’t have to bribe doctors and the floor isn’t covered in blades the nurses drop there after jabbing a finger for a test drop of blood. Lo is a clever, resourceful writer. He finds humor in his namesake’s struggles with mainland customs and red tape while tapping into a rich vein of memories and emotions stirred when history or crisis makes the challenges of family life even gnarlier.

Thematically rich and intriguing.