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I keep meaning to swing through here and do a sort of roundup of what media I've been trying out lately. More of the Laundry Files series, some great new space opera, nonfic on narratology, a variety of good TV shows... But I keep putting it off until I have the time and concentration to do it all.
Putting that off a while longer! But I realized that I really want to make sure people see this one. It's...well, a book, more or less? It's definitely a text memoir, with some illustrations. It was posted entirely on Tumblr, but there's an index. The whole book's done now, and there are prefaces going up, which reminds me of how good it is.
Ten Years A Peasant is the memoir of a man who was one of the sent-down youth who moved from the city to a very rural village because of the Cultural Revolution. He's writing now from in the US, where his children live, and his children helped with translation and annotation, as well as finding illustrations and putting it online. (There are occasional editorial notes to explain puns, jokes, wordplay, and points being made with particular Chinese characters.) It's the memoir of someone who's several decades removed from the experience, but also clearly found it the most formative part of his entire life.
And it's just...fascinating. The rigorous, brutal, clannish conditions that a lot of city kids were suddenly thrust into. The author's cheerful determination to make it work. The political enthusiasm of those kids and most of their neighbors, the political threat of accidentally praising the wrong person at the wrong time. The traditional labor that had been working for three thousand years and the author discovering why the tradition has stuck: because it's functional. The shift and change of incoming technology, and how to deal with it. Village politics and city politics, and learning how to silently manage between them. Everyone working around the rules, and everyone using rules to get things done. Cheery intervillage theft and retribution and competition and banding together against other people who don't understand.
I came away deeply impressed by the author, at that, who seems to have been an exceptional young man. He doesn't try to puff himself up; but his straightforward descriptions of how he tried to learn things, or adjust around problems, and what he did when problems hit him in the face, were really something. I wish I'd been half that determined and full of ingenuity when I was the age he described.
As he says in the preface, discussing when he showed his first chapter to friends:
My compatriots’ reactions were varied – some even said “it has a certain historical value." The initial motivation for writing these essays was for my children, but if it can have a bit of historical value, that is beyond what I’d hoped.
At the time, sending over 17 million youth into the countryside felt like a very big deal, but compared to the several hundred million migrant workers who have since left their homes to work in the cities, it seems barely worth a mention. And in another few decades, we will be gone and these eclectic stories would further disappear like the smoke.
It's just...really, really interesting, and a great book. (Besides, it's a memoir, so you know the guy going through all that trouble got out okay.) I highly recommend it.
Putting that off a while longer! But I realized that I really want to make sure people see this one. It's...well, a book, more or less? It's definitely a text memoir, with some illustrations. It was posted entirely on Tumblr, but there's an index. The whole book's done now, and there are prefaces going up, which reminds me of how good it is.
Ten Years A Peasant is the memoir of a man who was one of the sent-down youth who moved from the city to a very rural village because of the Cultural Revolution. He's writing now from in the US, where his children live, and his children helped with translation and annotation, as well as finding illustrations and putting it online. (There are occasional editorial notes to explain puns, jokes, wordplay, and points being made with particular Chinese characters.) It's the memoir of someone who's several decades removed from the experience, but also clearly found it the most formative part of his entire life.
And it's just...fascinating. The rigorous, brutal, clannish conditions that a lot of city kids were suddenly thrust into. The author's cheerful determination to make it work. The political enthusiasm of those kids and most of their neighbors, the political threat of accidentally praising the wrong person at the wrong time. The traditional labor that had been working for three thousand years and the author discovering why the tradition has stuck: because it's functional. The shift and change of incoming technology, and how to deal with it. Village politics and city politics, and learning how to silently manage between them. Everyone working around the rules, and everyone using rules to get things done. Cheery intervillage theft and retribution and competition and banding together against other people who don't understand.
I came away deeply impressed by the author, at that, who seems to have been an exceptional young man. He doesn't try to puff himself up; but his straightforward descriptions of how he tried to learn things, or adjust around problems, and what he did when problems hit him in the face, were really something. I wish I'd been half that determined and full of ingenuity when I was the age he described.
As he says in the preface, discussing when he showed his first chapter to friends:
My compatriots’ reactions were varied – some even said “it has a certain historical value." The initial motivation for writing these essays was for my children, but if it can have a bit of historical value, that is beyond what I’d hoped.
At the time, sending over 17 million youth into the countryside felt like a very big deal, but compared to the several hundred million migrant workers who have since left their homes to work in the cities, it seems barely worth a mention. And in another few decades, we will be gone and these eclectic stories would further disappear like the smoke.
It's just...really, really interesting, and a great book. (Besides, it's a memoir, so you know the guy going through all that trouble got out okay.) I highly recommend it.