A writer separated from her family by the pandemic remembers her upbringing in industrial China.
In a small industrial town in China, a family of three—a prideful teacher, her husband, and their quietly rebellious daughter—share a simple life, weathering moves, fights, a layoff, and illnesses. Two decades later, the daughter, now a writer living with her husband in America, reunites with her parents in her hometown after a long separation caused by a global pandemic. The trip is an occasion for her to reflect on her fraught relationship with her mother and the forces that pressurized and combusted their lives: echoes of distant wars and not-too-distant revolutions, tides of breakneck modernization, and the relentless erosion of time.
For fans of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Three is fable-like and precise, at once a sweeping view of an era and an elegy for a splintered family.
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Na Zhong 