Faraway

The death of an elderly person makes you mourn the entire landscape of a life, whereas with the death of a child it is the innocence that makes you sad. There is no backup for life, when the screening is over you’ve finished the very last reel.

In a dream, a street corner in a nonexistent city represents the suffering and entrapment of the main character’s father. He is unsure how to assume the father role in front of his child, having abandoned his comatose father in a ward.

Abandonment is one of the main themes in Faraway. The author writes about how his father abandoned his family and he himself daydreams about being capable of leaving his father and son (even leaving his two-year-old child alone in a hot car). The complicated and strained relationship with his father is further illustrated by the level of (naked) intimacy when taking care of his father and scenes such as the one in the bathtub when he was a child.

Farce
Faraway is a story about something you never want to experience: bringing home a loved one who has been hospitalized in a foreign country. You read how the author deals with the local customs to make sure everything goes smoothly. There is no way to know if he is handling it the right way.

Lo Yi-Chin tells of a terrible situation, which could come across as comical if it were not true. He and his family had everything against them in an unfamiliar environment. No help from the home front or great support from organizations that were supposed to help him. He felt trapped in that backward and impoverished city because of an old man’s ruined body and tried daily with all his might to get out of there.

In this story, he also gives his views on immigration and relations between Taiwan and mainland China, and gives the reader a glimpse into Taiwanese culture.

Disorderly scrawl
“My notes were a disorderly scrawl, like the hysterical, melancholy journal entries of a manic patient unable to let go of insignificant details. A thought floated into my brain: when all this was over, I would gather my memories and reconstruct this journal (this city, this hotel) as if it were a novel.”

I guess the level of detail and disorder in the book was intentional. The main character often reminisces about things that are not directly relevant to the storyline, such as when he lists all the items on the receipts he kept. Although I don’t like his detailed writing style – a matter of personal taste – he wrote many interesting sentences that made me think. I thought about what his words mean to me and what they mean to him. I think there is a difference.

Toward the end of the book, I thought Lo Yi-Chin was mocking my lack of appreciation for detail with a story about his writing classes. By revisiting the same part of the story (e.g., checking into his hotel) many times in different chapters, he does emphasize that it took a long time and that he performed the same actions every day during that time.

Expressing himself
Some lines are beautiful, others are thoughtful and confrontational, hiding nothing. Lo Yi-Chin likes to throw things at you to shock you, while also trying to cover up some of the frustrating events by providing comic relief. He calls it a Kafkaesque experience. Faraway is partly autofiction and the lines between life and fiction, history and imagination are blurry, as Jeremy Tiang mentions in his Translator’s Notes.

The narrator’s scattered thoughts and weary dreams show how strongly the situation affects him. Suddenly, in the middle of a conversation about his family in China, he would throw in information about his father’s suffering with full details about needle marks, excretion and affected body parts. And immediately after expressing his appreciation for Third Brother’s role as guardian angel, he continues as follows: “The hollow feeling of a human being so easily replaced by insignificant objects seemed like a metaphor for Third Brother’s migration story.”

As smoothly as that, dreamy and thoughtful thoughts turn into snide and hurt thoughts from a man who doesn’t know what to feel at that moment. The author skillfully expresses his own powerlessness that extends to his role toward his wife and child. His comical comments about the situation in the hospital (its sad state and quality) cannot disguise the mess and helplessness he feels.

Conclusion
I was very interested in reading about his experience with the hospital and procedures in a foreign country, and eagerly absorbed every comment that related to the narrator’s complicated relationships with his father and son.

I gave Faraway three stars because I’m not a fan of books with lots of detailed recollections and elaborations that take me away from the main storyline. You could argue that these side-steps were important to portray the right atmosphere, but I don’t think that’s true for all of them. While some pages encaptivated me, others did not. However, I am sure that Lo Yi-Chin’s writing style will appeal to many.

Faraway was written by Taiwanese author Lo Yi-Chin and sensitively translated by Jeremy Tiang. The author was inspired to write about his own experience as a son, a husband and a father and publishing the work after some time had passed. Many cracks are revealed and explored - between various pairs and groups of characters, between mainland China and Taiwan and their cultures, between those in charge and those who must depend on them. The reader doesn't have a wholly sympathetic character to relate to so must be moved instead by the flawed humanity we all share.

In this lightly fictionalised account of a trip the author made to mainland China from Taiwan to rescue his father after he’d suffered a debilitating stroke, his mission to get his father back home is constantly thwarted by a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare and a set of impenetrable set of rules and regulations. The father had fled mainland China after Mao’s take-over in 1949, abandoning his family, and set off for a new life in Taiwan. Once the fraught relationship between China and Taiwan finally allowed he went back on a holiday to re-visit his homeland, and that’s when it all went wrong. The son and mother rush to China and are horrified by the conditions in the Chinese hospital, which are in stark contrast to those in Taiwanese hospitals. What follows is an almost farcical – indeed at times actually farcical – effort to get his father on that flight out. Meanwhile, the son has ample time to reflect on his own life, his wife and son, his life in Taiwan and his newly found relations in China. It’s a meandering narrative, with much dark humour, about blood-ties, family dynamics and family loyalties, fatherhood and identity. I found it a compelling read, graphic at times (I hope I never have to stay in the hospital the poor father has to) and an insightful exploration in the culture clashes between the town countries. A glimpse into another world.