Spider Eaters: Memories of the Cultural Revolution

The title of Rae Yang's memoir derives from a saying by Chinese writer Lu Xun:
Some of our ancestors must have bravely attempted to eat crabs so that we would learn they were edible. Trials with spiders were not so enjoyable. Our ancestors suffered their bitter taste and spared us their poison.

Rae Yang herself was a spider eater, when she became a Red Guard and joined the full fury that was the Cultural Revolution at the age of fifteen.

Yang's memoir is a careful balance between her recorded thoughts and memories of her younger self with her feelings and reflections of the author at present. Easy to read, the book describes Yang's life in Beijing growing up during the 1950s and through the tumultuous 60's, blending together dreams, first hand experiences and stories, real and imagined, spoken to her by relatives and friends.

Particulary interesting are the chapters describing her re-education on the pig farm in northeast China. If you read this book and are unfamiliar with Chinese history/society, it is important to note how the hukou system works. The hukou system, meaning household registration, registers citizens within China to the village, town, or city into which they are born/have residence. It limited the migration of rural immigrants into the city, thus keeping a large supply of cheap labor for state-owned companies under China's old command system. This is still partially true today. Although Yang was a Beijing resident, her move to the northeast caused her hukou to be sent there. She was in danger of remaining a peasant with no way of transferring her hukou back to Beijing. I would equate this to if you decided to go out to Kansas to become a farmer for a few years. Here in the US you can always decide that farming is not for you and return to New York City, or move to a completely new city or state for that matter. In China, you would have to apply to leave the farm, and that was very difficult. (I may have over-simplified or incorrectly stated this, but that is my understanding of it so far.)

My questions: How truthful and factual do you find memoirs to be? If written many years after the event/experience took place, do you think the added time sheds more light on the truth of the events, or erases essential pieces?

NYTimes recently published this article about preserving the history of the Cultural Revolution.