Woman from Shanghai
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In Woman from Shanghai, Xianhui Yang, one of China’s most celebrated and controversial writers, gives us a work of fact-based fiction that reveals firsthand—and for the first time in English—what life was like in one of Mao’s most notorious labor camps.
Between 1957 and 1960, nearly three thousand Chinese citizens were labeled “Rightists” by the Communist Part and banished to Jianiangou in China’s northwestern desert region of Gansu to undergo “reeducation” through hard labor. These exiles men and women were subjected to horrific conditions, and by 1961 the camp was closed because of the stench of death: of the rougly three thousand inmates, only about five hundred survived.
In 1997, Xianhui Yang traveled to Gansu and spent the next five years interviewing more than one hundred survivors of the camp. In Woman from Shanghai he presents thirteen of their stories, which have been crafted into fiction in order to evade Chinese censorship but which lose none of their fierce power. These are tales of ordinary people facing extraordinary tribulations, time and again securing their humanity against those who were intent on taking it away.
Xianhui Yang gives us a remarkable synthesis of journalism and fiction—a timely, important and uncommonly moving book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Imagine being hungry enough to eat rats, worms, or human flesh to stay alive; these were the modes of survival for more than 3,000 of China's intellectual and political elites, known as "Rightists," who became the victims of Chairman Mao's policies in the years 1957-1960. Written in short-story form, Xianhui reveals the astounding tales of 13 survivors of a forced labor camp in the northwestern region of China. There, 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 had to close the camp; only 600 survived. The government then orchestrated a cover-up, rewriting the medical records of the dead and excising any mention of starvation. Moving and powerful, these stories are written as documentary literature, a form of reporting involving fictional elements created by Chinese journalists to disguise their subjects and escape retaliation from a still powerful government. The narratives also preserve the record of a regime's unspeakable inhumanity towards its people, events which were unrecorded for decades.
