A Memoir of Misfortune by Su Xiaokang
© Michelle Troutman
April 17, 2001
ISBN #: 0-375-41039-2
$24.00, hardcover
329 pages
The Chinese government thought author Su Xiaokang's television documentary River Elegy was one of the reasons college students united in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. Su himself became involved in the cause and spoke to the students. Before the bloodshed on June 4th he fled to Paris to avoid imprisonment and eventually moved to the United States. Su blames himself for his political involvement, which he believes indirectly led his wife to follow him to the U.S., where in July 1993, he and his family survived a devastating car accident. He documents their suffering and their attempts to live with the aftereffects.
During a trip to Niagara Falls, he entrusted himself, his wife Fu Li, and his son Su Dan to a friend whom he later learned didn't know how to drive. Su awakened a week later from a coma and sustained minor injuries. His son was physically unharmed. His wife suffered from a brain hemorrhage. She couldn't speak, and barely recognized her husband. After a few months of recovery she regained her speech, but she couldn't walk.
Su thinks before the accident he neglected his role as husband and father. Circumstances forced him to change his outlook on life and transform into a more mature person. Preceding his fame, he wrote human-interest stories. He criticizes his life as a Chinese exile in the early 1990s, when he spent much time giving speeches and interviews on the political climate in China, which he now dismisses like so much hot air. He and his fellow exiles lived in the same building, as he admits, not really accomplishing anything noteworthy. He believes the exiled writers haven't produced any important works since they arrived -- his book is an exception.
As he has written, though free, the accident had imprisoned him. His pain stemmed from guilt, for his son, the psychological distance of the mother he once knew, for Fu Li, dependence resulting from her injuries. Their adolescent son rejected his disabled mother; Su, often absent during his childhood, was also distant. Left on his own, Su Dan became more independent and found solace in impersonal computers and video games. Su Xiaokang is confused about the younger generation, and his son's embracement of technology.
Su Xiaokang also found difficulty facing the ordeal, and sought a reason for the accident. He describes feeling as though he has done something, in the Buddhist notion of karma, to cause his wife harm; Su's suffering was mental, as he terms it, a "black hole." He rushed to religion and Chinese medicine to fill it, though he couldn't relent to
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