"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China

admin — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:57:00 +0000

"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China is an account by journalist Lijia Zhang, who came of age in China during the ‘80s. Documenting her life from ages sixteen to twenty-six, Socialism Is Great! follows a revolutionary spirit through the dreary politics of factory work, her insatiable pursuits for education, and last but not least, a dramatic and taboo love life. This page-turner has a great storyline involving the democracy movement leading up to contemporary China.

Zhang’s memoir has an incredible sense of place, and without any background in Chinese history or culture, I found myself easily absorbed into the world she creates. In one respect, the dehumanizing environments and relationships she navigates hardly seem foreign. Yet she simultaneously portrays communism as a distinctly oppressive system exercising extreme control over her everyday life. Ultimately, Zhang succeeds in writing a sharp critique of communism China without catering to a capitalist readership.

The plot starts unfolding when the precocious teenager is pulled out of school by her mother and put to work in a government factory. From her family’s perspective, this is the opportunity of a lifetime, as the government has given workers a limited window of time to retire and offer relatives their enviable position. To Zhang, who excels in school and has her hopes set on becoming a journalist, it is devastating. While she has no choice but to accept the job, she does anything but resign herself to her situation. In fact, Zhang goes on to eventually lead the largest demonstration by workers in Nanjing, China during the entire democracy movement.

"Socialism Is Great!"'s strength lies in part in its genuine complexity. This is not a perfectly PC memoir: we learn about faulted characters and their relationships to one another in the midst of a dictatorship. What makes the book both gripping and empowering is that Zhang is always stretching herself to move closer towards her aspirations. Each love affair is a unique experience and life lesson, as the obstacles she faces are simply changed routes in the path to her inevitable success. That this autobiographical work is about a suppressed intellectual living through intense political turbulence makes this an important historical perspective in addition to an excellent memoir.

Written by: Kathryn Berg, September 13th 2009

I Think of You: Stories

admin — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:55:00 +0000

By Ahdaf Soueif

Anchor Books

The stories in Ahdaf Soueif’s book collectively form the multivoiced memoir of a woman growing up with academic parents in Cairo and in England and on the cultural margins of both places. Her first narrative, “Knowing,” told in the charmingly declarative voice of a child, tells of the wonders of the Cairo marketplace: fingering guavas, nibbling at the sheep head on a snack tray, sneaking a puff on a waterpipe. Here her world is ordered and patterned, “overflowing with an abundance of pleasures.”

The stories proceed, in progressively maturing voices, sometimes related in the third person, to convey the pain of transition. She is in England for the “Year of the Beatles,” but it is as an outsider: as one who loves the teddy boys and rockers, but is ignored by them in return. She envelopes herself in romantic literature (in many respects, this is an autobiography of a reading life) and increasingly isolates herself from a racist, fiercely class conscious world. Her account of discovering Fanny Hill and the Kama Sutra in her parents’ bedroom becomes a hilarious epiphany at the end of “1964”—one of many memorable moments in the book.

The adult narrative voice is reminiscent of Kate Chopin’s—as evocative, elegant, and simple in its rendering of a woman’s experience of love and childbirth—the sweet and terrible alienation of the individual who refuses to be simply a “mother woman” or conform to some other cultural stereotype. In fact, the ending of the book is eerily suggestive of the conclusion of The Awakening, which is not to suggest the book is self-consciously derivative, but rather to say that it forms, subtly and gradually, a powerful emotional bond with the reader that culminates in the beautiful nothingness of the sea.

Written by: Rick Taylor, February 12th 2007