Eric Emmanuel Schmitt’s “10 Children of Mrs Ming She Never Had” is a voyage to the world where dreams and imagination seem more real than any experienced reality.

IBNA: According to Le Figaro literary magazine, Mrs. Ming loves to chatter about her children each of which dwell in a far spot on China land occupied with a different profession.
Emmanuel-Schmitt’s readers should always ask themselves if Ms. Ming’s words are true, or she is lying all about them and has imagined everthing in her mind? And if it is imaginary, then it takes the form of the most exquisite delicacy making us to doubt whether it is the surest path to happiness. To these questions, Schmitt says yes. Through the spellbinding adventures of funny and sensitive Mrs. Ming, we find the fable just another piece of Schmitt’s “cycle of the imagination", as it has repeated in Oscar and the Lady in Pink. Now the author takes us to today's China, to meet a lady peeing outside the norms.

The narrator, a traveling salesman visiting French in the Great Hall Yunhai, initiates a dialogue with the very strange Mrs. Ming. This woman quickly tell him a lie by boasting of being the mother of ten children! How, indeed, in a country where no one can have more than one child by law, she has made such a large family?

Still, Ms. Ming has an amazing talent for storytelling. You'd swear she speaks the truth. Through the portraits of each of her interesting imaginary offsprings, we find all the wisdom of a Chinese experience, steeped in the philosophy of Confucius. As for the businessman, he is in love with the lady at the point of getting to ask if she would not say, finally, the truth. The point also that he, the cynical bachelor, comes to accept his return to Paris, to become a father himself.

Gardens of Words

Ultimately, Schmitt gives us a free nice life lesson through the account of one of Mrs. Ming’s children. Ms. Ming claims that one of her sons, named Wang, has a peerless power as a horticulturist in creating an ideal garden of words for his customers. The mother explains how for a good amount of money, he tells them his disposal for the garden, its color cast, its terraces of outbreaks, its various perspectives, the songs of birds , the shimmer of white water (...) and for a few yuan more, he brings the result down on paper. Everything is there. We will discover later that Ms. Ming is in fact acting as a novelist. Same with the story of Lady in Pink, Ms. Ming in “The 10 Children Ms. Ming Never Had”, has never actually born 10 children, yet the journey she takes the French traveler through is so insightful that he turns back with a better view of the world full of questions rather than like an obedient slave.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (born March 28, 1960 in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, Rhône) is a French-Belgian dramatist, novelist and fiction writer. His plays have been staged in over fifty countries all over the world.

Some of hsi best works include: "The Sect of the Egoists" (1994), "The Gospel According to Pilate" (2000), "Ma vie avec Mozart" (2005), "Ulysses from Bagdad" (2008), "Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran" (2001) and "Oscar and the Lady in Pink" (2002).

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