Murder in Eden

A love triangle between a Chinese poet named Jie Fang (Ray), who flees the political persecution after the student protests in Tiananmen Square, his wife Liu Bin (Flora) and his lover, Meng-er (Cindy). After a negative experience at a university in Utah, he and his wife move to Hawaii with their son, and are soon joined, in their humble shack, by the poet’s mistress, whom he brings from China. His wife reluctantly accepts the fact that his lover is living under their same roof, but she resents even more the fact that her husband gave her child up for adoption to a Hawaiian couple. In the end, the mistress, whose real motivation was to flee China as soon as possible, leaves the poet Jie Fang to marry their neighbor, Bill Campbell (the novel’s first narrator). Depressed and with a wounded ego, Jie Fang tries to fix his marriage, but it is too late: suddenly his wife announces her intention to divorce him because she is going to marry a Chinese exile whom they met during a stay at a French university. In the dramatic scenes that close the novel, the unfaithful poet cannot tolerate his wife leaving him for another man and ends up murdering her before committing suicide. Apart from this ménage a trois, “Murder in Eden” offers, through the narrator’s and several characters’ voices, an open criticism of the student revolts that ended with the massacre in Tiananmen Square, coupled with unconditional support for the Chinese government and the ruling Communist Party of China… From the Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel edited by Juan E. De Castro and Ignacio López-Calvo