From Publishers Weekly
Imagine being hungry enough to eat rats, worms, or human flesh to stay alive. These were the modes of survival for 3,000 plus of China's intellectual and political elites, known as "Rightists", who became the victims of Chairman Mao's policies in years 1957-1960. Written in short-story form, Xianhui reveals the astounding stories of 13 survivors of a forced labor camp in the northwestern region of China. Prisoners were forced to grow crops and raise livestock in the harsh environment of the Gobi Desert. Camp conditions were horrendous and treatment from the guards was brutal. The situation became so ghastly that by 1960, the sand dunes surrounding the camp were littered with corpses and officials closed the camp. Only 600 people survived. The government then orchestrated a cover-up, rewriting the medical records of those who had died-failing to mention starvation. Moving and powerful, these stories are written as documentary literature, a form of reporting involving fictional elements created by Chinese journalists to disguise the truths and to escape repercussions from a still powerful government. The narratives also preserve the record of a regime's unspeakable inhumanity towards its own people, events which were unrecorded for decades.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Xianhui Yang’s Woman From Shanghai, a newly translated collection of firsthand accounts that the publisher calls ‘fact-based fiction,’ is about what might be called the Gulag Archipelago of China. . . . Woman From Shanghai represents a remarkable contribution to a growing literature based on personal histories. . . . Readers of Mr. Yang’s book should not be put off by the frequent recurrence of common elements in these stories: the exposure to bitter cold; hunger so intense as to cause inmates to eat human flesh; the familiar sequence of symptoms, beginning with edema, that lead down the path to death; the toolbox of common survivor techniques, from toadyism to betrayal, from stealthy theft to making use of the vestiges of privilege, which survived even incarceration in this era of radical egalitarianism. It is through the accumulation and indeed repetition of such things that this utterly convincing portrait of a society driven far off the rails is drawn. . . . Most moving of all, perhaps, is ‘The Love Story of Li Xiangnian,’ about the persecution of a young man and the persistence of his ardor for his girlfriend. The haggard Li escapes from detention to be reunited with her, only to be arrested again. Their touching reunion many years later, after the woman is married, would not be out of place in a Gabriel García Márquez novel.” —Howard W. French, The New York Times
“In Woman from Shanghai, Xianhui Yang describes in wrenching detail the squalid conditions and widespread starvation that only 600 of the 3,000 prisoners were able to survive. Even some who lived to see their convictions reversed were forced to become paid employees of the labor camp. . . . Despite these horrors, there are stories of selflessness and fortitude.” —Sarah Halzack, The Washington Post
“Told in stark, spare yet deeply compelling prose, infused wit...
“In Woman from Shanghai, Xianhui Yang describes in wrenching detail the squalid conditions and widespread starvation that only 600 of the 3,000 prisoners were able to survive. Even some who lived to see their convictions reversed were forced to become paid employees of the labor camp. . . . Despite these horrors, there are stories of selflessness and fortitude.” —Sarah Halzack, The Washington Post
“Told in stark, spare yet deeply compelling prose, infused wit...
