Book Reviews
Spotlight on second book club
The staccato cadences of Roy’s collection still finds a general adherence through the themes of Chinese female life paths and thus it might be better to regard Butterfly Tears as a loosely linked story cycle. Roy’s collection certainly can be taught alongside a number of others, and I especially see that this work would resonate alongside others with strong Chinese diasporic and transnational sentiments; these include Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, and Xu Xi’s Access.
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The wounds may scab over but the open again and again
These are stories about women — only one of the fifteen stories has a male protagonist— but as with many women’s lives, theirs have been, and often continue to be shaped by men. One of those shapers was Mao Zedong. Zoë S. Roy herself witnessed the destruction of that time, and this lends an authenticity to the stories set in China and in North America. Despite the physical distance separating the old and new worlds, the protagonists understand that no amount of distance can heal the wounds made by the ruin of so many lives at the behest of so few; the wounds may scab over but they open again and again, and weep.
Sharon Hunt
The Fiddlehead (No 248, p 171)
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The stories are believalbe and direct
…In “Ten Yuan”, for instance, a man is denounced for telling a joke, and in Twin Rivers, a woman denounces her own husband. The paralyzing fear of the regime is an ever-present undercurrent in these stories, and some scenes seem almost prototypical of Orwell’s 1984.
There is a distinct feminine and feminist perspective in the stories. Many of them deal with women who cast off traditional values – Confucian or Maoist – to begin a new life in North America where they must confront unexpected challenges and troubles in family relationships. In “Butterfly Tears”, for instance, childhood memories of a crazed old man abandoned by his wife, entwine with an old Chinese myth of thwarted love and with disturbing dreams to torment a woman who is about to separate from her husband.
…This collection offers the reader many captivating cameos of the Chinese/North American experience as seen through women’s eyes. The stories are believable and direct and do not fail to engage the reader with their weave of dream, memory and often surprising turns of fate. Especially intriguing are the stories and scenes set in Mao’s China, which give us a rare glimpse in to the dark and frightening world of the Cultural Revolution, the totalitarian nightmare which in some way or another haunts every one of these stories.
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Rose Gold
Her Circle Ezine
Book Launch
Blurb
Sample Reading
Reader Reviews
At times witty and at times hearbreaking
There is also a chasm between mythical China—that of Liang and Zhu—and Maoist China. The first story in the collection touches on the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966, a moment of transition Roy returns to throughout her fiction. Maoist China not only lacks the music and myth of its earlier iterations, but it also lacks the history that can only be later, and somewhat haltingly, reclaimed.
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Joy to read
Roy's writing is a joy to read. Her sentences flow with beautiful word choices, descriptive yet not flowery. Each story was a pleasure for me to read, even when I did not actually enjoy the theme of the story.
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Women in whom vulnerability and strength coexist
Zoë Roy’s collection of short stories, Butterfly Tears, is compelling at a number of levels. The fifteen stories are poignant and sensual, as Roy’s characters find their way through the web sof complex relationships and the demands of both urban and rural environments. Drawing out the experience of migrants to North America from the China of the era of the Cultural Revolution, these stories also form an exploration of the subtle consequences of immigration, the gains and the lingering sense of loss. That the main characters are women, and women in whom vulnerability and strength coexist, adds a gender dimension to a collection in which the food and the secrets of its preparation continually symbolizethe nuances of both painful and comforting passages of life.
John G. Reid
Author of The People and Josh Wilson
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An exotic flavor, nevertheless
The nuances of intense and deep-felt passion resonate throughout the text. The female protagonists are all capable of responding with a sensuality which belies their being robbedof self under the autocratic Communist regime. The freedom to which the women have access in the West is starkly contrasted with the repressiveness of the modern-day East. An exotic flavor, nevertheless, tinges these pages, and the richness of the Orient is omnipresentin the imagery which Roy uses throughout the book.
This is a collection to be treasured and admired. Both thought-provoking and mysterious, Butterfly Tears evokes the strength and endurance of womankind across the cultures. A work that will best be appreciated by those with an ear and an eye for the unusual and the unique, don’t let this one slip out of your sight too soon, else you might come to regret it.
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Presentations
Guess speaker at York University on the topic of culture shock based on the short story "Noodles" from Butterfly Tears
Lecture in the Chinese Canadian Literature class at York on the publication of Butterfly Tears
