Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories
Scribner: 2023
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Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s novel Dear Chrysanthemums offers a provocative look at the defining events of the past half-century of Chinese history. The interconnected stories follow several female Chinese characters whose travails intersect during the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square massacre through to contemporary diasporic life in America and France. Sze-Lorrain empowers each of these characters to tell her own story, even if she doesn’t yet have the knowledge required to see its connection to the broader context. Each consecutive narration reveals more about a complex web of truths, both known and secret; of secrets both personal and national.

As a Singaporean-born French woman who has lived and studied in New York and Paris, Sze-Lorrain knows this complex web well. As a writer, poet, translator and editor, she has spent decades gathering people’s perspectives on modern Chinese history. Dear Chrysanthemums resonates with a rich and efficient prosody. The narrative structure is creative, with each story placing an increasingly complete puzzle on top of the last. In this way, the novel’s form follows its function, for fragmentation is a theme that lies at its very core. As the modus operandi of the Chinese state, fragmentation is the force that sets the events of the novel in motion; the force against which female protagonists fight to stay connected to a truth that aligns with their ethics and experiences.

• Tags: China, Christina Cook, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Issue 31