COCOON is a coming-of-age novel set in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan centering on the lives of two childhood best friends from the post-80’s generation, Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong, and a dark secret that binds their respective families’ – and their own – destinies.
The novel begins as a conversation between the pair in the present, with Jiaqi returning to South Yard after an abrupt departure eighteen years ago, when she left without being able to say a proper goodbye to Cheng Gong. Her well-respected heart surgeon grandfather is approaching his death. Jiaqi takes a walk and wanders to Cheng Gong’s old apartment, where she unexpectedly finds him sitting on the sofa. She invites him to the white building where her grandfather is. They observe him in a coma. Jiaqi’s cousin Pei Xuan is now a famous doctor in the U.S., she returned to Beijing just before the commencement of the novel to find Jiaqi in attempt to persuade her to participate in the filming of a documentary about her grandfather, which Jiaqi rejects because she knows the dark truth about her grandfather that her cousin is blessedly ignorant of. Jiaqi is a freelance writer with self-destructive tendencies including alcoholism, a trait inherited from her father.
Readers follow their conversation back in history. After meeting Jiaqi’s mother in the countryside after he was sent down during the Cultural Revolution, Jiaqi’s father defies her grandfather and marries the beautiful, yet uneducated woman with whom he has no common language. Jiaqi grows up craving attention from her emotionally distant father, but never received it. A talented poet, Jiaqi’s father quits his teaching position at the university after a disagreement with a superior, and leaves for Beijing to become a merchant; his business takes him on frequent trips to Moscow, and Jiaqi is left in her grandparents’ care after her mother leaves to accompany her father. Jiaqi’s father eventually divorces her mother and marries Wang Luhan.
Cheng Gong’s father, on the other hand, is a known delinquent whose frequent run-in’s with the law meant that his son was brought up by his mother who one day took off never to return. He is sent to the home of his grandmother and aunt. He is ostracized at school for his grandmother’s vindictive reputation, something she developed after her husband, a hospital administrator, was found with a nail in his head during the Cultural Revolution. The nail caused a subsequent infection and over two thirds of Cheng Gong’s grandfather’s brain matter was removed, leaving him in a vegetative state. Only one culprit, an internalist who hung himself, was considered the murderer, but many suspected there was another accomplice. Due to the relative high position he held at the hospital and the failure of the surgery, Cheng Gong’s grandfather lays in room 317, cared for indefinitely by the hospital staff. One day, Cheng Gong wanders to the Church at South Yard and meets a priest who promises the young boy presents in exchange for his service attendance.
Jiaqi is temporarily seated next to Cheng Gong the day she transferred to his school. Initially, the boy presumes Jiaqi too, with her privileged background, would ostracize him, but she surprises him. The pair, along with three other misfits from class become best friends and play together every day after school. Their favorite location: the death tower where bodies donated to medicine lay in pools of formaldehyde. Jiaqi and Cheng Gong grow closer together and begin to play without their friends in room 317, next to Cheng Gong’s grandfather. One day Jiaqi looks at the vegetative man in front of her and declares that his soul must be trapped inside. This enrages Cheng Gong because he’d never considered it before. He runs to the library to research and decides to make a ‘Soul Walkie Talkie’ in order to communicate with her grandfather. In order to come up with the 400RMB needed to make his contraption happen, Cheng Gong asks the priest; returning to the Church one day, Cheng Gong overhears a conversation between the priest and a woman explaining that it is Jiaqi’s grandmother who has been supplying the priest the funds to give Cheng Gong presents over a sin her husband had committed. It is then that Cheng Gong realizes that Jiaqi’s grandfather is the other accomplice.
Meanwhile, Jiaqi’s father shows up in Jinan and she follows him back to Beijing. In Beijing, she meets his new wife and finds out she had just had an abortion. Wang Luhan’s mother, who is a schizophrenic, also lives there. The couple fights, her father orders Jiaqi to leave with him, but she is blocked by Wang Luhan’s mother. Her drunken father takes off without her and crashes his car soon after. He dies. Wang Luhan is the daughter of the internalist who hung himself. Jiaqi is taken back to Jinan and is transferred to another school. She waits for Cheng Gong to come say goodbye, but he never shows.
In their adulthood, both struggle to come to terms with their respective knowledge of their families secrets and the aftermaths of their parents’ neglect. However, when they meet again in front of Jiaqi’s grandfather, who lays there in a coma like Cheng Gong’s grandfather before, they have come in a full circle, and it seems there is hope yet.
I think this novel is great. It delves deep into the psyches of two eleven year-old’s, exploring their respective insecurities, love and hatred, and how their past eventually comes to affect their present. Its structure grants the reader a feeling as if they’ve come upon two friends catching up. The prose is clear and extremely detailed, but these details were seldom unnecessary, they provided me with a sense of nostalgia, a deep feeling of familiarity. It is as much a story about these two friends as it is a story about China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and how it shaped the post-80’s generation in China. In the postscript, Zhang Yueran states that this story is based on a true story from her father’s childhood, the basis of which formed from a story he wrote and forgot about from 1977 titled, ‘Nail.’ She was fascinated by the story and carried out in depth research in order to complete her novel. And so, it isn’t entirely surprising that I was struck by its authenticity throughout, constantly bringing me back to my childhood.