Memory and Oblivion

Award-winning author Wang Zhousheng’s novel set in near contemporary Shanghai deals with the contemporary and universal problems of old age and illness and shows how a middle-class Chinese family goes about tackling them.

Retired nurse Ling Deqing is astonished, one day, to find her long divorced 80 year old husband, Xiao Zichen, standing on the doorstep. His second wife, the music teacher, Liu Qing has died and in a fit of absent mindedness, a sign of the onset of dementia, he has found his way back to his first home. Reluctant at first, Ling Deqing eventually takes him back if only to ease the burden on her daughter, Xiao Ying…

Wang Zhousheng’s finely drawn characters live and draw our sympathy as they grapple with the day to day problems of coping with Alzheimer’s. They are held together by a strong sense of family duty and memory which is besieged by the Alzheimer’s oblivion of the title. But behind the loss of personal memory there also stands the loss of historical memory, as significant dates pass unremarked.