Amber: History, Geopolitics, and Human Connection Across the Long Twentieth Century
Now available in Chinese
The Chinese edition of Amber topped Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly)’s list of the Ten Best Chinese Novels of 2018, selected from works published in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
Amber unfolds across a century, more than forty cities, and three continents. The story begins with Mo Xiaoxian—later known as Dunn Tse—a girl born in Mongolia in 1914. Her extraordinary gift for languages draws her into the political upheavals, intelligence networks, and geopolitical conflicts of her time. From the turmoil of Mongolia and northwestern China, her life unfolds across the shifting fault line of the twentieth century: Moscow during Stalin’s purges, Vienna during World War II, Shanghai and Nanjing during the Chinese Civil War, Hong Kong amid the waves of postwar migration, and New York from the Cold War into the age of globalization. Against this backdrop of revolution, war, ideological conflict, migration, and globalization, individual lives become inseparable from the larger movements of history.
Yet no single war, revolution, or political event stands at the center of the novel. Instead, the twentieth century emerges through individual lives and memories.
The novel unfolds along two narrative lines. One is anchored in New York in 2008, beginning with the funeral of Dunn Tse and following her granddaughter Amber as she inherits not only the family estate but its secrets. The other returns to Mongolia in 1927, where the young Mo Xiaoxian sets out alone toward a future she cannot yet foresee. From a girl on the Mongolian steppe, she gradually becomes an intermediary between intelligence agencies and competing political powers. The two narratives eventually converge, but what they reveal is not a complete account of the past. The “historical truth” painstakingly pieced together by later generations can never fully account for the entire real and lived truth.
This is where the name Amber takes on its fullest meaning. Amber never preserves history whole, but only a moment that time has left behind. What is caught within it may be insignificant, even fragmentary. Yet because it has survived, the vanished can suddenly become visible again
Amber shows that the great events of history are there, but always at a distance. The novel stays with individual lives-with people who rarely appear in historical accounts, and with their unrecorded emotions, choices, and losses that were never recorded.
Some remain in the record. Some have been completely forgotten. Others did everything they could to leave no trace at all. Amber gathers what remains of their memories, looking back at the twentieth century and at all that it left behind—and all that is slowly disappearing.