THE DRAGON'S VILLAGE: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China

by Yuan-Tsung Chen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 1980

In her foreword, Chen, who left China for America in 1972 and writes splendidly in English, describes this book as ""fiction. . . but true""--it's based on her own experiences doing land-reform work in a northern province of China shortly after the 1949 revolution. In the novel, Guan Ling-ling grows up rich in Shanghai, raised by her aunt and uncle, who quickly make ready to leave for Hong Kong with the victory of the hated Communists. But Ling-ling, as much out of adolescent curiosity as anything else, decides to stay. She joins a theater group, and when intellectuals are chosen to go out into the countryside as cadres, she goes as well--to Gensu Province, to the cold, barren, beyond-the-end-of-the-Wall village of Longxiang, where the peasants normally greet each other with ""Have you eaten?"" (meaning have you eaten today). Poverty is universal, and even the few landlords reap relatively meager benefits; yet, as a good cadre, it's Ling-ling's job to divest them of their holdings, redistribute the land, and bring a certain power back to a peasantry that has been taught to recoil from power by thousands of years of tradition. So it's a hard, troubled project--famine, rapes, old murders discovered, loose sanctions leading to pillage and looting--and the young city people almost cause irrevocable chaos. But Chen's narrative is ever fair by being clean; no groping is swept under out of sight; every humiliation to the town is met with one to the cadres--all in all, this gives a very clear-sighted picture of a society so new and unready it squeaks. A secure, inviting, never polemical or bitter book, then: one of the more valuable documents to emerge from post-revolutionary China.

Pub Date: May 2, 1980

ISBN: 0140058117

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION