Da Chen rushes into the New Paltz Village Tearoom with enough energy to light several villages. He's not drinking caffeine these days, but he scans the tea menu with visible yearning. He chooses a calming herbal blend and urges me to try the oolong, grown in the Fujian province of China, where he grew up. Soon he's conjuring a picture of tea pickers' earthen ovens and miles of tea leaves drying on bamboo racks. "You go to the mountain and see this, then you turn to the sea and see miles of salt flats, the farmers spreading it out so the miracle happens, a sparkling white gold is born."
Anybody who's ever met Chen is accustomed to such bursts of poetry. Three years ago, when he joined my writers' group, he charmed us all by fortune-telling our faces in the ancient Chinese manner he learned from his father, finding fame in this eyebrow, long life in the bow of that lip. He's never shown up without armloads of gifts, from towers of Asian delicacies to two dozen Krispy Kreme donuts. The opening lines of Chen's bestselling memoir, Colors of the Mountain, may shed some light on this largesse: "I was born in southern China in 1962, in the tiny town of Yellow Stone. They called it the Year of Great Starvation." Like his "brothers from another mother," Frank and Malachy McCourt of Angela's Ashes fame, Da Chen will never take food for granted.
Chen cuts an elegant figure in a white collarless shirt with silk-lined cuffs, tailored black slacks, and Prada ankle boots. In the past six years, he has published three memoirs (Colors of the Mountain, Sounds of the River, and China's Son) and the young adult adventure The Wandering Warrior. Now he's poised to launch Brothers, his first novel for adult readers. The sweeping 430-page saga garnered a starred review from Publishers Weekly and significant buzz at the Book Exposition of America, where Crown feted Chen alongside such stars as Senator Barack Obama. This month, the firm will release a first hardcover printing of 100,000 copies, and send Chen, with his bamboo flute and calligraphy brushes, on the first of three national book tours.
It's a wild ride by anyone's lights, but for someone who grew up in a farming village with more water buffalo than light bulbs, unable to pay for tuition and textbooks even when Communist cadres permitted him to attend school, it is nothing short of a fairy tale.
The Year of Great Starvation was also the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, when intellectuals and landowners were reviled. Chen's forebears were both. His paternal great-grandfather scored so well on a national exam for civil servants that China's ill-fated Last Emperor granted him the honorific title Jin-shi, the governorship of Pu-Tien, and a lot of land.
Chen's poetic grandfather inherited this wealth, raising his two sons in luxury. When they reached adulthood, the brothers decided to start their own business in underdeveloped Taiwan, first returning to Yellow Stone for a double wedding to their village sweethearts. Chen's uncle returned to Taiwan with his bride, while his father stayed home for a month to oversee some family business. During that fateful month, the Communists came into power. Overnight, the Chens were branded as "filthy landlords" and pariahs. Chen's father and uncle would not see each other again for 40 years.
The uncle became a successful Taiwanese banker, while Chen's father struggled to care for a family of nine between stints of hard labor in reeducation camps. Though Chen's fictional brothers follow a different arc, it is no surprise that he dedicated his novel "to my baba and my uncle," or that the dizzying shifts of Chinese political history would provide the huge canvas for this epic tale, narrated in alternating chapters by two young men with the same father and wildly different fates.
Shento is a poor village boy with near-mythological origins: His unwed mother gave birth in midair of her suicide leap from a mountain cliff. The newborn was caught in the branch of a tea tree, snapping the umbilical cord as his mother plunged to her death. An ancient medicine man heard his cries and climbed to save him, raising Shento with his childless wife. Years later, Shento will learn that he's the illegitimate son of a general.
General Ding Long has another son, Tan, raised in the lap of luxury and Party privilege. Inevitably, the brothers' paths cross, with many twists of fate along the way. When they unwittingly fall in love with the same woman, the headstrong and beautiful author Sumi Wo, the stage is set for a fraternal conflict of Cain-and-Abel proportions. It is Chen's gift to combine these timeless archetypes with acute observations of China's recent upheavals: His larger-than-life plot unravels against a very real backdrop of Vietnamese border wars, Tiananmen Square, and the emergence of rampaging capitalism.