Foreign Devil

by Wang Ping

Foreign Devil is a Red Azalea with more guts, grit, heart, and soul. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566890489
• ISBN13: 9781566890489
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Bleak oppression and indomitable will

Wang Ping's autobiographical first novel paints a searing, oppressive portrait of life in China, yet the narrator's indomitable will energizes the story, making the tone more driving than bleak.Ni Bing's story opens with a graphic, but entirely unerotic depiction of the loss of her virginity to her married lover and mentor, Yan. Bing is a recent graduate of and new teacher at the Hangzhou Teacher's School, and Yan is helping her prepare for college entrance exams. With this longed-for goal in sight, she risks everything for their dangerous and unfulfilling relationship.Haunted by a mystery about her birth which surfaces in bloody nightmares, Bing has felt alienated all her life. Flashbacks portray a lonely childhood during the Cultural Revolution, a virtual slave to a harsh but beautiful mother who was once "criticized" herself.At 15 she escaped her family to plant rice in a rural reeducation village. The Party used her to denounce an inoffensive landowner's son, and Bing, shamed, worked even harder, rising long before sun-up to read.The gripping beauty of the novel lies in Wang's depictions of physical labor and the Kafkaesque whirlpool of political danger. So vivid are Wang's images that the reader can feel the yoke of the coal cart on Bing's shoulders, the fear aroused by her paternal grandmother's mysterious rage, the cold dread of the interrogation, the slippery texture of rice gruel and fatty pork.Walking in the rice fields: "My feet sank deep into the ooze of the mud and the droppings of cows, pigs, chickens. The fermented manure felt warm and comforting to my wounds." Her first hamburger: "I took a bite and almost threw up from the bloody grease oozing out of the ground beef."Less successful is her relationship with Yan, an unappetizing and hysterically possessive man. Although Bing speaks of love, the reader feels only repugnance. She has used Yan as others have used her but she never seems to recognize this, even after she has surpassed him.Wang, who has lived in New York since 1985 and is the author of a short story collection, "American Visa," has produced a gritty novel of survival, touched with the drama of family dynamics.

From China to America

Wang Ping's novel was hard to put down. This novel describes a young girl from China and her difficult and at times life threatening life in China.The main charcter Ni Bing describes what she is willing to do in order to have an education and a life different from her family in China. She eventually is able to journey to America. After reading "Foreign Devil" I wanted to read another novel about Ni Bing.I still want to read more in order to see what happens to Ni Bing once in America. Wang Ping enables one to feel the life this young woman led.