The Rice Sprout Song

ISBN-13: 9780520210882 / Angielski / Miękka / 1998 / 182 str.

Eileen Chang; Ai-Ling Chang; David Der-Wei Wang

Opis

The first of Eileen Chang's novels to be written in English, The Rice-Sprout Song portrays the horror and absurdity that the land-reform movement brings to a southern village in China during the early 1950s. Contrary to the hopes of the peasants in this story, the redistribution of land does not mean an end to hunger. Man-made and natural disasters bring about the threat of famine, while China's involvement in the Korean War further deepens the peasants' misery. Chang's chilling depiction of the peasants' desperate attempts to survive both the impending famine and government abuse makes for spellbinding reading. Her critique of communism rewrites the land-reform discourse at the same time it lays bare the volatile relations between politics and literature.

O autorze

Eileen Chang, eigentlich Zhang Ailing, geb. 1920 in Shanghai. Ihre literarische Karriere beginnt 1942 in der von Japanern besetzten Stadt. Es erscheinen zwei Erzählungsbände. 1952 geht sie zunächst nach Hongkong und Taiwan, 1955 dann in die USA, wo sie an verschiedenen Universitäten unterrichtete. Sie stirbt 1995 in San Francisco.