This memoir depicts the lives of an Australian historian and a Chinese translator. David and Karen Walker accompanied eminent translator, Li Yao, on a search for his family’s roots in western China. It was not until the end of the book that I discovered Karen and David spent three years living in China from 2013-16, so they were not casual visitors. The two men, each in their 70s, are linked because of Li Yao’s translation abilities. In 2014 he had translated David Walker’s memoir, Not Dark Yet, just one of 30 books by Australian authors that he has translated.

This memoir links accounts of the men’s lives, from David’s early days in South Australia, with his grandfather, an English immigrant; and Li Yao’s early life in Inner Mongolia, with a family history in western China stretching back hundreds of years. The way it moves from one man’s life to the other between paragraphs can be slightly disconcerting, but it certainly binds their lives together, and the backgrounding provided is a lesson in Australian and Chinese history. The addition of maps would have been useful.

The most powerful chapters concern Li Yao’s own experiences, and those of his extended family, in post-World War II Communism and during the brutal Cultural Revolution. Because his grandfather was a ‘landlord’, he and his siblings were noted as ‘politically unreliable’. Even his pillow, embroidered with ‘happy together’ characters by his mother, was deemed to represent ‘old’ values and he had to cut those characters from it.

While Australia and China may not currently be the best of friends, these two men have found ways to bridge the divide.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville