Thank you for joining us on the High Plains Public Radio Station. My name is Jessica Sadler and I am a Science Teacher and STEAM facilitator in Olathe, Kansas. I am here with the other book leaders to discuss Banished by Han Dong.
This novel is set in 1969 while China is in the height of their Cultural Revolution. The main family, the Tao’s, are banished from their comfortable city lifestyle to the countryside where they have dropped to the bottoms of the social and socioeconomic ladder.
This novel has been selected to explore the 2023 Spring Read theme– In Touch with the World.
Throughout their time living in Sangyu, the family tries to make changes and live their new lives fully immersed in retraining and learning new things.
I was struck most by the part of the novel that discusses the idea of home or a home. Young Tao never returns to his former home after the passing of his father. This time in his life connects to a quote by Ch’u Tien-hsin’s: “We cannot call a place home if no family member dies there.” This is a phrase that has the power to connect many different people and cultures.
We often bury those closest to us in family cemeteries or locations where others important to us have been laid to rest. Even those who may choose alternative burials often have requests for their remains to be placed in locations with memories that create a “home” for them in that space.
I now live in Kansas but when someone asks me “where I’m from” or “where is home” without pause I say Oklahoma. This mentality makes a text to text connection for myself to another High Plains Public Radio Reader’s Book Club novel Belonging by Nora Krug. In her graphic novel she speaks of finding her HEIMAT. This relates the family history, home, and connection.
This novel does a nice job taking readers through small life events that become a part of the larger story shared amongst the entire nation. While this story may portray as nothing but tragedies it explores the realities of leaving home be it by force, for college, or even a long trip. Many countries and cultures share a history of relocation for one purpose or another, from the Trail of Tears to the Holocaust and beyond people have had to leave their homelands throughout time and continents.
This story not only touches on the leaving but also what happens in the new location. What events take place there that might have the power to make it more or less significant than where you came from. I think modern day reservations in the United States explore many of the themes in this novel. To have a home and then to be condensed to a specific set of acreage with lack of basic needs is just shy of what many Native peoples still experience today yet because “the war” is over that present history often passes by silently.
Many families had to leave their ancestors and true homes behind. What Tao continues to see when “he thinks of “home,” he dreams of the bleak house his father built in the village. But he does not feel sure about it, so he is never able to speak out the location of his “old home” confidently,” resonates with the feelings of many.
This is Jessica Sadler, and you are listening to the High Plains Public Radio Reader’s Book Club