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.

Factory Girls by Leslie Chang

Imagine this is your workday:

You wake up from your bunk bed in a cramped dorm room for eight, and with the morning alarm promptly ringing at 6am you are up and fighting for use of the bathroom with all the other women on your dorm floor. By 7am you have eaten in the factory cafeteria along with the other 50,000 employees in the factory complex. That’s right- the factory employs over 70,000 people, more than the population of a small American city! After breakfast you are stationed on your assembly line team. Your task: to cut the upper materials that will eventually become the body for sneakers of famous brands like Puma, Nike, Adidas, and many others. You do this for 12 hours everyday, with a 1 hour lunch break and dinner break. You finish work by 9 or 10pm and return to your dorm to begin a new day tomorrow. It’s only Monday, and you still have 5 more days of work before your one Sunday off. You make roughly 1,000 rmb a month- $160.

Such is the life of many factory girls in China, yet their move from the farming villages into working conditions such as these are seen as a success and a triumph for millions of migrant women.

Leslie Chang offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives of real young migrant women in China, girls our age, who move from their rural villages to bustling centers like Shenzhen, Dongguan and Guangzhou, all of a two hour train ride away from Hong Kong. Simultaneously, Chang also weaves in her family’s own personal history in China. And for once it felt very satisfying to get a Chinese American’s perspective on all the happenings of modern China. She is also the wife of writer Peter Hessler, who wrote two great books on teaching and living in China- Buki has the one I traded at our book swap, Oracle Bones.

Whenever I read books about China, I always reflect upon my own experiences there, and I feel like I’m re-living much of it all over again. Chang provides amusing and humorous glimpses into facets of Chinese society I may never encounter, making the book a fast and entertaining read. I also really appreciated the way in which she worked in the personal story of her family, as I felt it was something I have been wanting to do with my own experiences in learning about my family’s history in China and Hong Kong.

Another favorite scene in the book is when she writes about one of the main characters who works in a handbag factory. It turns out that the handbag factory makes purses for Coach, but the girl and her fellow workers never really understand the true value of how much the bags are worth, trading them among friends and never really using them.

Hope you will all get a chance to read this!

Peter Hessler's River Town

So while traveling around China for a month, I had a lot of time to read on the 14 hour train rides between cities. I finished off Peter Hessler's River Town. He was a Peace Corps volunteer back in the late 1990s, the first batch sent to China, where he taught English at a small sleepy town along the Yangtze River.

If there is one book I would recommend to summarize many of my own experiences and feelings about China, it would be this book. I really hope you all get a chance to read it. It's entertaining and insightful about being a foreigner in China, Chinese history and culture, and the growing pains and successes of the nation and its people in modern times.

Happy summer reading!