Three Brothers: Memories of My Family

About

Yan Lianke returns to his childhood home in Song County, Henan Province, and writes the story of his family through the Cultural Revolution and the decades of transformation that followed. Three brothers, each choosing a different path — literature, business, farming — become a portrait of the choices available to rural Chinese families when modernity arrived and demanded that everyone pick a direction. This memoir is warm where Yan's fiction is fierce, revealing the personal roots of the rage that powers his novels. The portrait of rural Henan is vivid and specific — a world of labor, loyalty, and the complicated love between siblings who understand each other's choices without approving of them. A memoir about the family behind the fiction — and the discovery that the truest stories are sometimes the ones you lived.