UNDER RED SKIES

Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China

By Karoline Kan

The subtitle of Karoline Kan’s bracingly forthright memoir flags one intended audience: fans of multigenerational Chinese family sagas. And it has much to offer those hooked on this enduringly popular genre. High points of “Under Red Skies” for such readers include Kan’s sensitively told stories about a grandmother influenced late in life by the folk tales about animal spirits she heard in her youth and of a grandfather who found solace in the 1990s in Falun Gong exercises and beliefs — until an official drive to eradicate the group forced him to cut his ties to the organization.

“Under Red Skies” may be of even more interest to a second set of readers: those fond of stories about determined women who overcome obstacles. We quickly learn that Kan’s mother is such a woman. Consider, for example, the actions she took during the months leading up to the author’s birth in 1989. Kan’s mother already had one child, a boy born in the mid-1980s. Under the strict family planning policy in effect at the time, this meant that Kan’s parents should have considered their household complete. But Kan’s mother, determined to have a daughter, was ready to take risks and used subtle forms of subterfuge to achieve this goal. On one visit to a doctor, she even hid a metal ring under her coat to trick an X-ray machine into thinking she was using a mandated birth control device.

The book also tells us a great deal about another determined woman: Kan herself. The village she was born in and the provincial town she grew up in were the sorts of communities whose young inhabitants rarely gain admittance to Beijing institutions of higher learning and almost never become published authors. Kan beat long odds to do both. After earning a finance degree from a university in the capital, she pursued her dream of making a living as a writer, despite urging from her parents to follow a safer career path. Through a mixture of luck, determination and the strong English skills that subsequently allowed her to write “Under Red Skies,” she secured jobs as a writer for a Beijing expat magazine and then as a researcher for The New York Times. Eventually she landed an agent and a book deal.

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Hers is, in short, a true-life Horatio Alger tale, albeit one with distinctively Chinese, 21st-century and feminist elements. These features are all on display late in the book, when Kan returns to her hometown and struggles to explain her new life to the cousin who had been her best friend in childhood but stayed put and followed a more conventional path. Though generational differences loom large in “Under Red Skies,” Kan also conveys the importance in China of rural-urban divides. She strives, with only limited success, to get her perplexed onetime confidante to grasp why she is unconcerned that she is still unmarried in her mid-20s and how excited she is to be performing in a Chinese version of “The Vagina Monologues.”