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.
David Der-wei Wang is Professor of Chinese Literature at Columbia University. His current publications include Running Wild: Contemporary Chinese Fiction (1994).
"A modern Chinese classic."—C. T. Hsia, author of History of Modern Chinese Fiction
"Eileen Chang beautifully and movingly evokes 20th-century China and the hearts and minds of Chinese women.—Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
"[Chang] is arguably the finest prose stylist of the 20th century."—Frederick Wakeman, University of California, Berkeley
182 pp.5 x 8
9780520210882$27.95|£24.00Paper
Aug 1998