Over the past few years I have picked up and put down the book as it couldn’t keep my attention. Unfortunately I really struggled to push through this one, but the original premise of a wedding over a day in a story really appealed to me.

Likely a lot dealt with cultural misunderstandings for me, but it would likely be a very interesting book for those more familiar.

I apologize to the publisher for my delay in reviewing. Thank you for the opportunity to read!

On a December morning in 1982, the courtyard of a Beijing siheyuan―a lively quadrangle of homes―begins to stir. Auntie Xue’s son Jiyue is getting married today, and she is determined to make the day a triumph.

This book was a lot to take in and I was kind of confused at times by all the different characters. It definitely didn't help that I went between the audio book and the e-book. I think, for me, I should have just read the e-book for better concentration. The jump between all the characters was just a bit much for me.
I gave it three stars though because of the Chinese history and culture and the grapple between the past and the future. This book takes place over one day located at a Beijing siheyuan leading up to a wedding taking place. It describes the lives of those who live there. It has a lot of interesting topics my personal problem was I just couldn't keep up with who was who.

Thank you Netgalley for a copy of this book for an honest review.

I'm a sucker for novels with stories-within-stories and weddings, so this hit me right in my heartstrings AND make me laugh. There's not better reading experience than that. I look forward to recommending this book on an upcoming episode of the Strong Sense of Place podcast about China. This is just the kind of book our audience loves: rich descriptions, loveable (and difficult characters), and a setting that whisks you away to another place.

I thought this was simply marvellous. I was hooked from the first page. Set on a single day, 12th December 1982, it centres around a wedding party arranged by Auntie Xue for her son Jiyue. In spite of her meticulous planning, things soon begin to spiral out of her control. Although the wedding is the central conceit of the novel, it develops into something far more panoramic and all-embracing. People come and go throughout the day and we learn about each of them. Their backstories, their present circumstances, their hopes and desires. Yes, there are a lot of characters, but each is described in such detail that it’s not difficult to remember who’s who – although naturally the names need concentration. They are sometimes quirky, sometimes unsympathetic, but always human. Set in a specific time and place, the novel refers back to the recent past and looks forward to a changing future as modernity begins to creep in and affect the inhabitants of this siheyuan. (Look up siheyuans, I had to, and it’s worth it….)We learn how the Cultural Revolution upended people’s lives and how the generation who grew up during it has been forever affected. The past is still present but all the characters have somehow adapted to the new China. We learn about the intricacies and details of everyday life. There’s satire here, but gentle satire, humour, but gentle humour. All the characters are treated with equal insight and empathy. Much Chinese history is referred to but lightly, and it’s never didactic. The reader simply absorbs it all and thus becomes absorbed in Beijing life just as the characters do. An entertaining, enjoyable and informative read.

Sadly, I did not mesh well with this one.

As a fan of wedding stories, I expected something a bit different. I don't shy away from stories where there is family drama, relationships issues, last-minute changes, mysteries and secrets... I actually love all of that, but this one fell short, simply because it was boring.

I just couldn't focus since nothing grabbed my attention for too long, and I found myself just waiting for the book to be over. But, I know that we all have different preferences when it comes to the pacing, the characters, the plot, so I still think someone might enjoy this. But it just wasn't my kind of a read.

I apologise to the publisher for a belated review, due to personal issues.

I've always loved reading translated books, they're a breath of fresh air among the usual reads. So, when I saw The Wedding Party on NetGalley I immediately requested it. This is an award winning book originally written in the 1980s by Liu Xinwu, later translated into English by Jeremy Tiang.

The Wedding Party provides an account of a single day; 12th December 1982. It's the day Xue Jiyue and Pan Xiyua are to get married and as much as Jiyue's mother is trying to keep everything on track, some problem crops up causing her trouble. The day sees many characters arriving to be a part of the wedding party, bringing with them their own tales to add. The guests at this wedding party came from all walks of life and the conversations among them provided an incredible insight into the lives of Chinese people during the 1980s.

I particularly liked the humor in The Wedding Party, it made me laugh at times and I loved how Liu Xinwu has woven all the bit of stories into a beautiful thread.

if this wasn't a review copy, i would have dnfed it a looong time ago. it just was so boring. now, i know that this is a translation and i don't trust translations to the fullest, so this might be just that. but, long story short, i didn't enjoy it

Thoroughly enjoying this one but sadly could not complete before archival. What I did read was as much a history lesson as a story and one I want to know more about. I will seek out this book so that I can find out how the wedding goes!

Liu Xinwu has captured the intricacies of everyday life in The Wedding Party and we meet an interesting group of characters during the book. The story starts with the preparation for a wedding in Beijing and as we meet more characters, we get to know more about their personal stories and the recent history of China.

I liked how the book has been laid out; each character has a chapter devoted to them and there’s a two-line summary of the chapter at the beginning. So, you have a vague idea of what to expect when you encounter each character for the first time. The chapters can be long, but they aren’t necessarily directly dependent on one another. I read them as a series of short stories that have an overarching theme: the wedding.

I think the translator, Jeremy Tiang, has brought each of the characters to life in English but managed to maintain their individual personalities very well. I also like that the translator has kept a lot of Chinese words in the translation. This can be a tricky thing to do as it might disrupt the reader’s experience, however, in the case of The Wedding Party it adds to the atmosphere and authenticity of the story.

Originally published in 1985, Liu Xinwu’s prize-winning The Wedding Party has finally been translated into English by Jeremy Tiang. With this translation, the post-Mao world of slowly rising middle-class China is open to new readers. Set on a winter day in the courtyard of what was once a wealthy person’s huge home but is now subdivided into many middle-class residences, this is the story of a shifting kaleidoscope of Beijing folks who come and go throughout a day-long wedding party thrown by retired grocery clerk Auntie Xue for her son Jiyue and his bride.

Don’t think for a moment that this is a comic Chinese version of The Big, Fat Greek Wedding. Xinwu provides humorous moments, yes. However, Liu Xinwu focuses not only on the Auntie Xue’s efforts to throw an impressive party but on the array attendees—family, friends, neighbors, and party crashers—and on their backstories, relationships, and thoughts about life, all rooted in and shaped by the oppressive Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four. This is the story of the common people comprising 1980s Beijing. Readers will laugh a bit, but mostly they will learn.

My thanks to NetGalley and Amazon Crossing of an advance reader copy of this outstanding, complex look at Chinese life in the aftermath of Mao.

Netgalley provided me with this novel in exchange for an honest opinion.

This book that I'd never heard of is apparently a Chinese classic about the lives of modest Chinese people living in the 1980s and before.
I can understand why it's a classic because it's basically a photograph of China at that time and all that took place during and after the revolution. The author begins with a wedding party (of course) and tells us a little about what are or have been the lives of the people attending it. Then, the wedding taking place in a sihehyuan (see picture below), we learn about the past and present of the people living there too.
[img]
My personal problem with this book is that there were so many characters that I had trouble remembering who was who and did what. I remembered some of them - and maybe the names didn't matter much, only the recounting of history did. This is a novel best read in one or two sittings, not putting it down and picking it up as I had to do. You should give it a minimum concentration, something I was not able to do at this moment, so I DNFed it at 40% approximately.
However, it did not repell me in the least and I'd love to pick it back later and give it all the attention it deserves.

Wherever you are, weddings are a big deal. Families pull out all the stops to keep up appearances (and mostly within the constraints of their budget). The bride and groom are feted with good food and gifts. Guests, too, partake in the bounty so that they can spread the word about what a good time was had by all. And I imagine that, once it’s all over, the hosts breathe out a huge sigh of relief. Given the cultural importance of such an event, it’s not surprising that Liu Xinwu uses a wedding in a cramped siheyuan in Beijing to not only explore the push and pull of wedding traditions in The Wedding Party, but also the tangled relationships of the siheyuan‘s inhabitants, friends, relatives, and coworkers. This brilliant novel—excellently translated by Jeremy Tiang—is a whole world in 400 pages.

In a siheyuan shared by (as far as I can tell) at least six families located near the landmark Drum and Bell Towers, Auntie Xue and her husband are hosting the wedding of their youngest son. They’ve hired a promising young chef to prepare a series of dishes for the wedding banquet. (The food in this novel is briskly described in a way that, nonetheless, made my mouth water.) They invite several of the neighbors, a manager or two, and the bride’s Seventh Aunt (there to make sure that the bride will be treated well in the Xue household). Over the course of one day, Auntie Xue sweats bullets trying to make sure that everything goes according to plan and that Seventh Aunt can bring a good report back to the bride’s family. This means that she has to downplay the drunken boisterousness of a family acquaintance, content with Seventh Aunt’s nitpicking, assuage the bride’s materialism, explain away the chef’s secrets—until it all blows up near the end of The Wedding Party.

From this event, plots spiral out as the narrator’s perspective introduces us to a huge cast of characters. Nearly every chapter is like a novel itself in that Liu gives us character studies, backstories, and a lot of post-Liberation* Chinese history up through 1982 (when the novel is set). I had to take my time with this book because it is dense. This is not a complaint. I was absolutely fascinated by Liu’s history and character studies. The Wedding Party is a slice-of-life novel that definitely lives up to the metaphor. As each chapter spotlights a different character, we get to see what motivates them and how they intersect with the Xue wedding. We also see how many of them live in their rooms at the siheyuan: whether they have to stretch every coin until it screams or if they’re well off, whether they long for the old days or if they’ve embraced Western fashions, their struggles at work or in their love lives, their hobbies, and so much more.

I’ve read a few books about life in China, past and present, but many of them are set during the deadliest times in the country’s history. These stories need to be told, of course, but The Wedding Party—set almost a decade after the end of the Cultural Revolution—takes place during a relatively peaceful time and the plot can therefore focus on daily life without the threat of death or denunciation. I highly recommend this book to readers who like fiction with heavy dollops of history and culture, or who want to see a day in the life of ordinary Chinese people.

DNF @ 77%
I expected this book to be a funny story about a chaotic wedding and how people are in that time, but it wasn`t that. Sadly. It was too much info dump and things happening… I was just bored most of the times, I really wanted to try to finish it but I could not.

“The Wedding Party” (钟鼓楼), by Liu Xinwu, translated into English by Jeremy Tiang, is a Chinese literary classic, published originally in 1985. Set in Beijing, on December 12th, 1982, the story follows multiple characters living in a traditional siheyuan courtyard, in the neighborhood where the ancient Bell and Drum Towers stand watch over generations. The main event of the day that brings all the characters together is a wedding, as chaotic and hectic as weddings can get. In the chaos, the lives of multiple, ordinary Beijingers intersect, in positive and not so positive ways. What makes this book stand out though, is the detailed life accounts of these ordinary characters. In less than 400 pages, Liu Xinwu manages to bring to life an impressive cast of characters, each with a fully fleshed out personality and life story.

Winner of one of the most prestigious literary prizes in China, the Mao Dunn Literature Prize, this novel is profusely character driven and infused with Chinese history. Time and perspective play a great part in the story, and the author strives to show how the same amount of passing time and historical events affect individual lives in different ways. The point of view of the omnipresent narrator worked perfectly well in this story. From the enticing chapter subtitles, aimed at stirring the reader’s curiosity, to the openly asked questions in the chapters posed by the narrator, this was a different way of storytelling than what I am used to, but I loved every moment of it. I am a big fan of novels where characters’ lives become intertwined in unexpected ways, and I felt this book delivers amazingly in that respect. I became very invested in all the characters’ stories, and I can wholeheartedly say that I didn’t want this book to end. I would have happily read another 400 pages about these characters, or other people living ordinary lives in Beijing. I also must say that the cover illustration, illustrated by Xinmei Liu, is one of the most beautiful covers I’ve seen, and encompasses the spirit of the book perfectly.

If you love character driven stories, and like peeking into people’s lives, then this book is definitely for you. There are few books out there that upon finishing I immediately thought I want to reread, but this is one of those. I am very happy and grateful this book is now accessible to the English speaking world, and I hope to read more of Liu Xinwu’s works in translation soon.

Thank you so much to NetGalley, OTPR & Amazon Publishing for the gifted copy and for inviting me to be part of their virtual blog tour. All opinions are my own, honest, opinions.

A fascinating read a book translated from the Chinese sprawling with characters.A book that brings us into their lives their world so much going on so many involvements.I really enjoyed this book and a look into their society.Really enjoyed Will be recommending.#netgalley #amazoncrossing.

Get ready for a thousand characters! But Liu develops each one satisfactorily giving a very thorough insight into Beijing siheyuan living. This was blurbed as a comedy (and maybe to the Chinese it is?) but it is not a comedy of errors nor a comedy of hijinks like the blurb suggests. Instead, it feels like an exploration of a very specific time in Chinese history through the scale of everyone who lives in the siheyuan (which is not a small amount of people). The book also (and I found this the funniest bit but it's not everyone's dark humor) offers an ending like an academic paper- questions and future avenues of study instead of a culmination or conclusion. This book winds and goes long and has no conclusion but is nevertheless a great read.

dnf at 32%

This is a lovely story and I enjoyed what I read, but it’s just too slow going and I’ve completely lost the thread

The cover of the book looks like it could be a children’s book or a comics. But that is totally misleading, this is a sprawling novel of 400 pages, full of humor, people, events and considerations on life and history. I don’t know if the title of Wedding Party has been chosen by the publisher or the translator, but it is an English choice. It is obviously the focus of the main action, as we follow a group of people who are gathering on that day for a wedding celebration. Yet, the Chinese original title refers to the location of the action: the Bell and Drum Towers in Beijing. These historical buildings are towering the action and acting as eternal landmarks compared to the agitation and constant changes of the humans that live in their shadows.

The book is set in the winter of 1982 in Beijing, which is a bit of a low-key period in Chinese history. The struggles and upheaval of Maoist era are over, people are coming back slowly from being sent away by the Cultural revolution. Yet, it is not the booming economy and wealth that we now know, or rather, it is the first moments of the dawn. People are just starting to have their basic needs covered and they can start to buy some things for pleasure, and even buy fancier wedding presents and wedding food. Some even have Japanese brand watches and install electric bells on their door, instead of letting people drop by unannounced. The Bell and Drum Towers are not a wealthy neighborhood, people live in hutong and siheyuan, which are courtyard houses split between lots of families. This make for rather… ahem… rambunctious relations, when people with various interests, wealth, status, culture and prospects are obliged to rub shoulders every day and share water taps and more.

A wedding is a stressful day for the bride and groom and their families, and it was as true in 1982 in Beijing as it is today. The mother of the groom is hosting, and her aim is to have all the guests fed with delicacies and properly impressed. The bride is a young materialistic saleswoman who basically measures her happiness to the amount of wedding gifts and especially a much awaited gold watch. The wedding will be all but serene and auspicious when dozens of neighbors and guests, including people who aren’t quite welcome (a drunkard and a thief) go through the courtyard and share this day of excitement.

The novel is full of humor and humanity. Liu Xinwu has so much empathy for his large cast of characters, and he takes the time to explain the origins of many misunderstandings and disputes that erupt on that day. Liu Xinwu is the author who is credited for inventing the scar literature, a literary form who presents the suffering of the victims of the Cultural Revolution. It is visible in this novel as more than one character alludes to their past and how they have endured the previous decade, but not in a tragic, heavy tone.

This book was awarded the Mao Dun prize at his publication in 1985, which is the equivalent of the Booker prize for China. It’s not meant to be a direct criticism of the regime, but it is quite direct in showing cases of injustice, cronyism, hypocrisy and incompetence. Liu Xinwu also shows how the parents and grandparents of those living in the siheyuan had a miserable life before 1949 as Communists came to power. Because we also see the younger generation more interested in achieving success for themselves than proclaiming any Communist ideal, we can only reflect how these havej grown up and probably turned into the wealthy generation of the 2000s.

I enjoyed this novel a lot because it was linked to a lot of personal memories, but I believe it might appeal to Western readers who’d like a fun glimpse into old China daily life.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley. I received a free copy of this book for review consideration.

thanks to netgalley for providing me with an early ARC in exchange for an honest review.

this book was enjoyable but it just fell short for me. i liked the premise of following a bunch of characters at a wedding, but the povs were a lot and too detailed for my writing. it did nothing to further the impact of the story and i was bored for most of the time.