Spider Eaters: A Memoir

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University of California Press, Apr 28, 1997 - Literary Criticism - 318 pages
Spider Eaters is at once a moving personal story, a fascinating family history, and a unique chronicle of political upheaval told by a Chinese woman who came of age during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. With stunning honesty and a lively, sly humor, Rae Yang records her life from her early years as the daughter of 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 laborer on a pig farm in the remote northern wilderness. She tells of her eventual disillusionment with the Maoist revolution, how remorse and despair drove her almost to suicide, and how she struggled to make sense of conflicting events that often blurred the line between victim and victimizer, aristocrat and peasant, communist and counterrevolutionary. Moving gracefully between past and present, dream and reality, the author artfully conveys the vast complexity of life in China as well as the richness, confusion, and magic of her own inner life and struggle.

Much of the power of the narrative derives from Yang's multi-generational, cross-class perspective. She invokes the myths, legends, folklore, and local customs that surrounded her and brings to life the many people who were instrumental in her life: her nanny, a poor woman who raised her from a baby and whose character is conveyed through the bedtime tales she spins; her father; her beloved grandmother, who died as a result of the political persecution she suffered.

Spanning the years from 1950 to 1980, Rae Yang's story is evocative, complex, and told with striking candor. It is one of the most immediate and engaging narratives of life in post-1949 China.
 

Selected pages

Contents

A Strange Gift from the Pig Farm
1
Old Monkey Monster
8
Nainais Story Turned into a Nightmare
16
Nainai Failed Her Ancestors
24
Why Did Father Join the Revolution?
31
Second Uncle Was a Paper Tiger
38
The Chinese CIA
50
When Famine Hit
58
Red Guards Had No Sex
130
Semitransparent Nights
146
The Hero Once Departed Will Never Come Back
159
In a Village Think Feel and Be a Peasant
174
The Tree May Wish to Stand Still but the Wind Will Not Subside
188
Nainais Last Story
200
Remorse
217
Friends and Others
233

A Vicious Girl
66
Auntys Name Was Chastity
74
Beijing 101 Middle School
87
The Hero in My Dreams ΙΟΙ
101
At the Center of the Storm
115
My First Love a Big Mistake?
245
What Have I Lost? What Have I Gained?
261
Epilogue
274
Copyright

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About the author (1997)

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

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