Ingratitude

the long version

"I was dying to see Mother suffer at the sight of my corpse," announces the young woman at the heart of this powerful and disquieting novel, which has won acclaim in France and in Canada for its author, who emigrated from Shanghai to Montreal in 1989. All her life, Yan-Zi has been dominated by her mother - who scolds her, corrects her behavior and manners, urges her to adopt bourgeois mores, and ceaselessly reminds her that her very life is a debt she owes to others, especially her mother. So Yan-Zi decides to commit suicide in order to shake off the yoke of her mother's love. In this novel she tells the story of her last days with a cool, cruel detachment that recalls Camus's The Stranger.