Bringing Order to Chaos

Huang HaHa’s recount of “half-told stories, half-formed ideas and half-remembered incidents take her readers through the depths of the Cultural Revolution as seen through the eyes of a child. This novel has everything, screaming curses, stamp burning, bottom sniffing, opera loving, heart wrenching, revolutionary dialogue all mashed together and skillfully framed by the hazy depths of distorted memory of a distant time and place.

In fact, Liu Sola was so skillful in deliberately simulating the organic development of a woman like Haha from the hyperbole of youth to the isolation of adulthood, that it took me a long time to figure out why I didn’t like the book at all.

The story follows two distinct paths, skipping unapologetically back and forth between a Huang as a young woman living in raindrenched London and the childhood that she left behind in China. Although her lonely life in London’s bland cityscape provides the basic framework for the novel, all of the action and emotion is set in her recollections of a Chinese upbringing.
A member of the “Lost Generation” Haha was born to a landowning family, the high status of which resulted in her father's imprisonment and suicide. The reader follows the young Haha as she attempts to join the red guards, screaming swears to impress them, apparently attempting to fold herself into the Cultural Revolution. The youthful character is without moral compass, either in support or rejection of the revolutionary ideals erupting all around her. She elicits only a glimmer of disgust when her brother burns his stamp collection, and never shows real progression throughout the book (even as an adult with Michael in London).

Perhaps I simply don’t understand what the young Haha’s narrative purpose was, she appears to be static, amoral, and self-restricting, with little attempt to make her plights relatable to the reader.

I didn’t find Chaos and All That difficult to follow (as some of my classmates did) for me it was difficult to relate to. The novel and its protagonist are unfocused in what I believe was a deliberate attempt to simulate a realistic life-experience, the only problem is that the rest of the book is surreal, extreme, and probably fictitious.

Liu Sola was clearly not tethered to the idea of writing an autobiographical depiction of her young life, so why then, does she decide to write in something closely imitates the formations of real memories? The novel was well written, but for me it lacked a clarity of purpose, a soul and a drive that could make either her new or old life feel authentic (or at least enjoyably fictional)

In the end, the book felt like an attempt to make extreme situations purposeful and relatable; like describing a car wreck you suffered years ago, not in terms of sweeping exaggeration or meticulous detail, but in the confused emotionally unreliable precision of having been there. Too often the story (and Haha herself) become a smeared canvas of emotion that manages to be too frantic and somehow too synthetic at the same time.