Between Departure and Farewell (The North American Edition of "Fortress Besieged")

Author: Yu Lihua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-04-01
Features: The novel depicts love, hate, affection, and enmity among men and women at American higher education institutions, conflicts between colleagues, family disputes, romantic entanglements, tests of friendship, and revelations of human nature. The story is vividly portrayed by the author. I have always admired Yu Lihua's writing style. She has a keen and meticulous observation of people's clothing, appearance, expressions, and psychological states, both for men and women. She excels at character development and skillfully uses long and short sentences to describe complex inner emotions.
Dr. Yang Zhenning, the Nobel Prize winner in Physics, wrote "Between Departure and Farewell," a newly completed long by Yu Lihua. The main content focuses on the lives of a group of Chinese professors at an American university. If combined with her earlier works on the theme of studying abroad, this novel can be seen as a summary of her experiences in campus life. This is not only because the story is set in a university town but also because through the growth and changes of some characters, she discovers a thought-provoking issue: the professors on the lecture platform today are not the students of yesteryear? However, what puzzles her is why those youthful and spirited campus elites, once they earn a Ph.D., take on teaching positions, achieve academic success, and then many begin to decline and become corrupted? She finds that intellectuals and scholars seem to be even more vulnerable to tests than ordinary people, unable to uphold their beliefs and principles.
In "Between Departure and Farewell," Yu Lihua portrays a group of such characters, writing about their deviations in behavior. She has lived abroad for decades, spending time in Western campuses and having long-term contact with the characters in her works. She shares the same era's emotional background as them, and thus understands them, their limitations, and their sorrows. From this foundation, Yu Lihua's interpretations are naturally far more insightful than those of general works of this kind.