Journey to the Outside World

A Journey To The Outside World by Y.S. Wang

Reviewed by Mary E. Dana

Rating System
Excellent Read	*****
Highly Recommended	****
Very Good	***
Good	**
Not Recommended	*

Reviewer Rating: **** Stars
Title: A Journey To The Outside World
Category: Fiction
Author: Y.S. Wang
Publisher: Xlibris
ISBN: 0-7388-2156-X
Release date: June, 2000

This fiction, written with a first person narrator, reads like a memoir. Y.S. Wang’s development of the many characters aboard the trans-Siberian train from Beijing to Moscow is magnificent. Every character different and each character added depth to the story. But a train ride is like that. Party time for five days.

Shao (young) Wang leaves his friends at Tiananmen Square for a scholarship in Brussels.

"I knew I meant nothing to my government and my government meant everything to me. It controlled my food ration, my housing, my freedom to change jobs or go abroad, and even decided, if I had been married, my right to father a child. At age twenty-one, I’d lost my expectation of love and given up my will to fight."

One of the most important characters Shao meets is the Communist Lao (old) Wang who wears a Chairman Mao pin on his chest. "I was annoyed, realizing that I had just managed to leave a loyal Communist Party official, my father, and bumped into another even more extreme Maoist." Lao travels with his wife Teacher You back to Moscow where they first met as students. It develops Lao has cancer and lost one lung to tuberculosis as a student. Teacher You is almost blind. They had a son, a student in the United States, who would graduate soon only he died in an automobile accident in the States. Lao thinks he is keeping the son’s death a secret from Teacher You by reading letters from him off blank sheets of paper. Teacher You learned Lao had only a month or two left because of cancer and she keeps that a secret from him.

Shao learns in the course of the trip to accept individual differences. He loves his parents but can’t understand how they can be fooled by the Party Line.

By the time the train reaches Moscow, he realizes that when they (as with Lao and his wife) became communists, it was better than what they had and they suffered just as he and his fellow students who now struggle for change and for many of the same reasons.

And oh yes, there is romance. Blond, blue-eyed, American, Maryanne who is in her thirties catches his eye. Author Wang has her balance Shao’s youth and help in his maturity. Never had Shao been with a woman.

With this huge (over twenty characters) cast, so many conflicts, and so many lives revealed--each one a cameo, this is definitely a book to read.

I had trouble with the ending, however. Maryanne and Shao promise to meet at Central Station in Brussels in eight years at noon and take the trans-Siberia back to China together. She dies of pancreatic cancer but makes her daughter promise to keep the rendezvous. A young Maryanne, Shao thinks, and accepts the gift.

"’Before her death, my mother asked me to promise to come today to accompany you on your trip back to Beijing,' Wendy said." Throughout the novel, the narrator foretells the future--he marries Maryanne; only we find out at the end it is her beloved daughter. If only the daughter had chosen, with free will and independent spirit, to go on the trip that made her mother so happy, I could accept it. No Mother of Maryanne’s apparent caliber would elicit such a promise.