Yuan-tsung Chen

Yuan-Tsung Chen has had an interesting life: born into a prosperous family in 1930s China, she managed to survive both a stint in rural northern China during the land reform period and subsequent famine in the early 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution and its subsequent purges, despite being married to a high-profile writer whose links to Mao Zedong suddenly became a liability. Her own links to Zhou En-Lai helped to get her, her husband and son out of China, and they ultimately travelled to the U.S. via Hong Kong. Now in her '90s and once more living in Hong Kong, Chen has written her memoirs, at least partly out of an impulse to show the parallels between mid-century China and the resurgent authoritarianism of the Xi regime.

This is an interesting read and the parallels are certainly unavoidable. Yet I found myself mentally pencilling question marks in the margins here and there as I read. I'm no expert in Chinese history, and I'm certainly not suggesting that Chen is fabricating any of the events she describes here. (Although apparently there have been some critiques of her memoir on the grounds that so many sources from the period were destroyed that parts are unverifiable, and that Chen may have exaggerated her closeness to figures such as Zhou En-Lai.) But I did notice how, in her telling, Chen is always on the right side of history. Maybe it is possible for someone to have their moral compass point unwaveringly true north in the midst of such insanity, but I'm not sure it's a feat I could match.… (altro)

nonfiction/memoir - Chinese national describes her time spent as a government cadre/comrade, at first somewhat sheltered in the large cities of Shanghai and Beijing, through a first-hand experience of the land reform period in the rural northern country (1949-early 1950s redistribution of landowners' wealth leading to poorly managed fields and overly taxed starving peasants and a failure of the Great Leap Forward), in the Cultural Revolution (1966 and after, young people indoctrinated and enlisting as Red Guards) and subsequent purging of higher up officials with waning support for Mao, including time spent with her suddenly vulnerable philosophically Marxist husband in a northern labor camp.

So much packed in here, and I am glad that this story was able to be published at last (the author is now in her 90s and living in Hong Kong). It is a rare (uncensored) look inside Maoist policy and practice, and I learned quite a bit about Chinese history and what my ancestors might have gone through.… (altro)

Shanghai, 1949: It was a tumultuous time in Chinese history, when changes wrought by the Communist victory were beginning to sweep the land. 17 year old Guan Ling-Ling, idealistic and headstrong, renounces her middle class privilege to join a revolutionary theater group that will bring reform to the countryside. Ling-ling suddenly finds herself in a world so far from her own experience that she can barely understand the lives she has been sent to change. From the moment she enters Longxiang an unrelenting flood of events engulfs her: plots and counter plots, acts of violence, midnight raids, even glimmers of first love. The book is an autobiography from inside the early land reform and it is in that that it holds the most interest. The stories are amazing and only hint on the massive reforms going on over the even more massive land mass of China at that time. The problem is the writing style. It feels more like an awkward translation than an autobiography and the cultural differences in characters development, pacing, empathy, and dialogue is striking, if not awkward even for the learned reader. The book is a great literary compliment to the Chinese history of the time but would be hard to digest without background in Sino-social history.… (altro)

Described as "an autobiographical novel of revolutionary China", it tells the story of those heady days 60 years ago, as Ling-ling, the daughter of a well-off family in Shanghai, volunteers to go to the remote northwest of China to help carry out land reform. Nothing in her life up till then has prepared her either for the aching poverty or for the process of overturning centuries of traditional relationships, and the forces of anger and revenge that can be unleashed when you do so.

The work teams feel their way through the reform process, from trying to mobilise the peasants to destroying the power and mystique of the landlords. This may not sound like the most gripping subject, but I found this book fascinating. It's told very much from Ling-ling's perspective at the time, and so her dominant emotions are positive. But it's not a whitewash. Ling-ling, for example, is troubled by the fact that traditional attitudes are hard to change, even when the subject of those attitudes is different (the landlord's widow is ostracised the same way a woman perceived as bringing bad luck used to be). There is also a grim but all too believable account of the way that ends can come to justify means, and how the voice of conscience can be gradually stilled.… (altro)