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.
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
“By oscillating between scenes that are bland in their matter-of-fact concreteness and ones that are almost unbelievable in their nightmarish cruelty and complexity, Rae Yang skillfully evokes the bizarre and contradictory ‘revolutionary’ world in which she grew up in Mao’s China. Spider Eaters is a reminder of what a traumatic history the Chinese people have undergone this century and that a country’s pasteven when many would rather forget italways lives irrevocably on within those who experienced it.”Orville Schell, author of Mandate of Heaven
“How can we expect anyone to know the United States without understanding the effect the Sixties had on all of us? Similarly, how can we know China without comprehending the impact the Sixties and the Cultural Revolution had on its politics, culture, and people? Rae Yang’s
Spider Eaters goes far in building that understanding. It is a gripping memoir.”Lisa See, author ofOn Gold Mountain
From the Back Cover
“By oscillating between scenes that are bland in their matter-of-fact concreteness and ones that are almost unbelievable in their nightmarish cruelty and complexity, Rae Yang skillfully evokes the bizarre and contradictory ‘revolutionary’ world in which she grew up in Mao’s China. Spider Eaters is a reminder of what a traumatic history the Chinese people have undergone this century and that a country’s past—even when many would rather forget it—always lives irrevocably on within those who experienced it.”—Orville Schell, author of Mandate of Heaven
“How can we expect anyone to know the United States without understanding the effect the Sixties had on all of us? Similarly, how can we know China without comprehending the impact the Sixties and the Cultural Revolution had on its politics, culture, and people? Rae Yang’s
Spider Eaters goes far in building that understanding. It is a gripping memoir.”—Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain
About the Author
Rae Yang is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Dickinson College.
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