China Book Club: 'The Colonel and the Eunuch' by Mai Jia
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This is the most enjoyable and quotable Chinese novel I have read in years.
A bestseller in China, it tears up the rules about story structure.
The viewpoint character grows up in a small village in south China listening to stories about the Colonel: some say he was a legendary wartime doctor, some say he was a traitor, still others say he is a wicked sex machine. The stories are bawdy and mesmerizing, always larger than life. Yet in reality, the Colonel is just a middle-aged man who loves his cat. And why on earth does everyone call him 'the Eunuch'?
Only years later, when the protagonist becomes a middle-aged man does he would look back and finally solve the puzzle of who the colonel really is.