A Chinese Winter's Tale: An Autobiographical Fragment

by Yu Luojin, Rachel May (Translator), Zhiyu Zhu (Translator)

A compelling social document as well as an intensely personal account of the author's experiences as a young woman during the Cultural Revolution. One of the first post-Cultural Revolution texts to deal openly with sex, its emotional honesty and spirited tone made it one of the most widely read and controversial works of contemporary Chinese literature.

239 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1986

Reviews

[Konstantine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yu Luojin was born in 1946. During the cultural revolution, her parents were labelled as 'rightists' and enemies of the proletariat. Because of their class status, Luojin and her three brothers, Luoke, Luomian, and Luowen, were 'marked down' at school (no matter how well they did in exams) and denied entry to university. Although a committed communist, Yu Luoke disagreed outspokenly with the party policy of the time. His most famous pamphlet, 'On Class Origins' (1967), criticized the way in which people were being punished for their family background and argued that everyone should be treated equally, i.e. party members should not have hereditary rights when it comes to such things as university entrance. Luoke was arrested for his views in 1968 and executed in 1970.

The present book, 'A Chinese Winter's Tale', originally published in 1980, is one of the most famous accounts of the cultural revolution. In essence it documents the destruction of a family amidst the madness of that time. I have read it a few times and it never fails to move me. Especially memorable parts include Luojin's memory of the reaction of her mother in the days after Luoke's execution (her hair turned white overnight), as well as her account of her own turbulent wedding night. A large part of the book is about Luojin's time in the so-called "Great Northern Wilderness" in Heilongjiang, where she had been sent (essentially as a political exile) to work as a labourer in the fields. The book ends with a collection of the author's beautiful family photographs.

[Cassandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is hard to properly judge work from another culture, especially something so personal as this, so while there were places where I felt the style interfered with the substance, I do not think I can clearly say whether it was good or ill. Luojin's story is painful, it resists closure, and although she writes about herself she angles the light upon her brother's life and death in such a way that sometimes she fades from view. I wonder if, later on, she was able to write about herself fully? I wish more of her writing were available in English.