Spider Eaters – A Memoir - Hardcover

Yang, Rae

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520204808 ISBN 13: 9780520204805

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

Spanning the years from 1950 to 1980, this work represents the personal story of a Chinese woman who came of age during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. The author records her life from her early years as the daughter Chinese diplomats in Switzerland, to her girlhood at an elite middle school in Beijing, to her adolescent experience as a Red Guard and later as a labourer on a pig farm in the remote northern wilderness. She tells of her eventual disillusionment with the Maoist revolution and how she struggled to make sense of confliciting events that often blurred the line between victim and victimizer, aristocrat and peasant, communist and counterrevolutionary. Moving between past and present, dream and reality, the author aims to convey the vast complexity of life in China as well as the confusion and magic of her own inner life and struggle.

About this title

Review:

"Moving, poetic, and honest, this is one of the best memoirs yet published of the Cultural Revolution in China."--"Kirkus Reviews

About the Author:

Rae Yang is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Dickinson College.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0520204808
• ISBN 13: 9780520204805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 298