We Three

We Three is a family memoir written by Yang Jiang in her later years. In 1997 her daughter Qian Yuan died of illness; in 1998 her husband Qian Zhongshu passed away. After losing the two closest people who had accompanied her through life, Yang Jiang, then ninety-two, sat alone under a lamp and, with a restrained and gentle pen, wrote the story of the family of three's sixty-three years together from the beginning. The book has three parts. Part One, "We Two Have Grown Old," is very short; it opens with an old person's dream and describes a couple who have spent half their lives together sensing each other's aging. Part Two, "We Three Have Been Separated," uses the image of the "ancient post road"—both real and illusory—to link the family's gatherings and partings by the sickbed, writing out the dread and reluctance of impending farewell. Part Three, "I Alone Miss We Three," is the longest and proceeds chronologically: in 1935 the couple went to study in England and joyfully had a daughter, Ayuan, in Oxford; afterward they returned to China and lived through war, migration, political upheaval, and illness, yet the family always supported one another, turning ordinary days into each other's safest refuge. The book ends with surviving fragments of Qian Yuan's handwritten manuscripts from her illness, family photographs, and letters—the most moving footnotes to this memoir. At about 90,000 characters, the prose is plain and understated, never wallowing in grief; it uses small everyday details to hold up an immense loss, which makes it especially rewarding to reread. Many readers regard it as the gentlest classic in contemporary Chinese prose on family love and parting.