Sons Of Heaven: a novel

With Sons of Heaven, Terrence Cheng has crafted a personal and insightful look into the Tiananmen Square massacre and its participants. Inspired by the famous footage of the unknown man who stopped the tanks, Cheng creates a conjectural history for him in the character of Xiao-Di, an intelligent, opinionated young man raised by his grandparents in Beijing. The father of Xiao-Di's girlfriend, a supervisor at the employment bureau, helps him receive a scholarship to study at Cornell. After ending the relationship and returning to Beijing, Xiao-Di finds himself blacklisted from employment. Idealistic and angry, he joins the growing student movement centered in Tiananmen. Cheng intersects the narrative with Xiao-Di's brother Lu, a bitter, vicious soldier later ordered to capture him, and the character of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, combining history and speculation in an attempt to understand the violent response to the protests. With patience and understatement, Cheng offers a sympathetic glimpse into each man's inner life and motivations, revealing their shared experiences and tragedies. The author humanizes these stories with just the right amount of quietly stunning detail in his assured, elegant prose, such as the "sparkles over the Mao pins" on Lu's boyhood uniform, or in Deng's evocative dreams:

Here is a wolf-faced Mao, lean and sharp-eyed, his hair long and wavy framing the sides of his face. He smokes cigarette after cigarette, blowing clouds into the air of the blue night.… Mao stands with a rifle and blasts a shot into the night, and in the purple drop of evening stars shatter and rocket the sky.

A haunting, rare book, Sons of Heaven communicates the basic humanity of these characters and the true cost of their conflict. --Ross Doll