Spider Eaters: A Memoir
- Book Review,
by Rae Yang
Amazon.com
Born in 1950, Rae Yang came of age in a time of tremendous social upheaval in her native China. Her parents, Communist intellectuals who had been in favor with the leadership, were denounced during the so-called anti-Rightist campaigns of the 1950s. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Yang, a Red Guard, traveled throughout the country spreading revolutionary fever--an exciting period, she recalls, that she had much time to reflect on while later working at a collectivized pig farm. (She named the pigs under her charge, she writes: Capitalist, Prince, Natasha, and so on.) Disillusioned by the violence, repression, and hardship all around her, Yang eventually managed to leave China on a student visa for the United States. "Lies, big and small, cannot easily hypnotize me," she writes, and her memoir paints an honest portrait of a China in suffering.
From Publishers Weekly
Yang, assistant professor of East Asian studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., spent her early years in Switzerland as the daughter of a Chinese diplomat, and returned to Beijing in the mid-1950s. Although her father's background was upper-class, her parents were committed Communist Party members and educated Yang to become a Maoist revolutionary. This engrossing memoir deals with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, when Yang became a Red Guard who denounced adults she considered counterrevolutionaries. With other fanatic teens, she traveled the country spreading propaganda, raiding homes and inflicting beatings on anyone suspected of political disloyalty; one of these beatings led to the death of the victim. The author also describes friends and relatives who influenced her, vividly invoking her upper-class grandmother, who shared a rich heritage of folktales with Yang. After spending several years as a farm laborer, Yang began to question the revolution and made her way back to Beijing and eventually to the United States. Photos. (Apr.) FYI: The title refers to those driven to eat anything they can find, especially during hard times such as the famine, or Three-Year Natural Calamity, of 1959-1962.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Currently an assistant professor of East Asian studies at Dickinson College, Yang was born in 1950 to parents who were cadres in the Chinese Communist party. She spent her preschool years in Switzerland and elementary school years in China during a famine. Yang attended one of the most prestigious middle schools in Beijing, became a Red Guard, and worked on a pig farm and out in the fields with the peasants. In her memoir, she explores the question of whether she was ever loved and whether she was worthy of love from her parents, nanny, aunt, and grandmother. She describes how women were regarded as jiashu (disposable dependents) by the so-called egalitarian Communist party and how she acted out her revenge on those who imposed hierarchy and formality. For historians and scholars, Yang's book offers a depth of detail on coming of age during the Chinese Cultural Revolution that is unrivaled among other recent memoirs (see especially Anchee Min's Red Azalea, LJ 12/93). Highly recommended for all libraries.?Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Oak Park, Ill.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
TITLR YAng, Rae. Memoirs correct history's inevitable oversimplifications. There is nothing simple about the life Yang, now an East Asian studies professor at Dickinson College, relates. Daughter of Chinese diplomats, as a child she lived in Switzerland before moving on to Beijing. As a teenager, she became a Red Guard and volunteered to work at a pig farm in the Great Northern Wilderness. But years of endless labor and the recognition that political and military leaders who mouthed Mao's slogans still abused those--peasants and "educated youth" volunteers alike--who lacked political clout brought an end to Yang's heroic dream. Returning to her parents, by then both teachers, she learned English, caught up with her studies, and ultimately took up graduate study at the University of Massachusetts. Spider Eaters is a highly idiosyncratic narrative, full of Chinese folklore that Yang's beloved nanny told her, dreams and half-dreams from years of troubled sleep, and, set apart in italics, comments on how she felt about her experiences at the time. Appropriate where interest in recent Chinese history is strong.
From Kirkus Reviews
Moving, poetic, and honest, this is one of the best memoirs yet published of the Cultural Revolution in China. Yang (East Asian Studies/Dickinson Coll.) was born in 1950; her parents, both professors, had impeccable revolutionary credentials. She spent her early years in Switzerland, where her father served as a diplomat, and was a teenager back home in China when the Cultural Revolution began. She reveals, with unsparing insight into herself and tenderness for those caught up in it, the impact of this upheaval on the close-knit families and idealistic youth of China. She describes the first violent months of the Cultural Revolution as the most terrible and also the most wonderful of her life, as, with the certainty of youth, she and her fellow revolutionaries trashed their teachers, their political leaders, and all those that stood in the way of Mao's vision. A teacher was beaten to death for asking students to practice their art by drawing nudes from plastic statues. Yang and her comrades in the Red Guards hauled officials in for brutal interrogations, and she was part of a group that banned, with disastrous consequences, all private shops in the city of Guangzhou. Volunteering to go into the countryside, she was assigned to a pig farm. She remembers musing at the time, ``I think I love Chairman Mao more than my parents.'' Much of the memoir consists of her hard experiences on the farm and her gradual recognition that the Cultural Revolution was a ``tremendous waste and unprecedented human tragedy''; the true class struggle in China, she realized, was being waged by entrenched and corrupt bureaucrats against the Chinese people. Eventually she managed to get back to Beijing and to obtain a scholarship from the University of Massachusetts. This is a sad story, filled with individual tragedies, but deeply revealing in its portrait of idealistic youth lost in a convulsion almost beyond human conception. (19 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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