BOOK REVIEW: GROWING UP IN THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC

Book Review: Growing up in the People's Republic



Book Review: Growing up in the People's Republic

Introduction

I do not want to elaborate on this book because it is especially new (it can be published in 2005) or especially famous. I want to centre my comment upon this book because it is an excellent book, which allows us to see history from a different perspective; which sheds light upon the very process of history writing, and also upon some of the most controversial periods of recent Chinese history: The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Cultural Fever of the 1980s (Lieberthal, 1987).

Discussion and Analysis

Thus, reading the book is like sitting together with Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong, and listens to their autobiographical narrations and their dialogue. These two women who sat together in Boston shared their stories, experiences and worries from their early childhood to the time they left China for the USA in front of a tape recorder. When Ye Weili asked Ma Xiaodong to partake with her in a project of oral history, they were both aware of the fact that they shared many structuralism characteristics. They had both been born in Beijing around 1950 they had both lived through the Great Leap Forward in the city, they both became Red Guards in their early youth, and they were both sent to the countryside, and allowed to return to Beijing 1973 in order to study. In addition, finally they both left China in the 1980s to travel to the USA to continue with their studies (Hlawek, 2007).

However, as the conversations evolve in the book, which certainly keeps and underlines the intimate character of oral history, the reader realizes in the most natural way how the same historical and social facts can be lived and experienced differently by people who are in a very similar position and situation. None of the periods we have mentioned were lived by Ye and Ma in the same way. Sometimes their experiences are even contradictory with each other. In addition, this is the greatest value of the book: it adds perspective, it adds a further dimension to the socio-historical accounts we use to read. Ye and Ma's experiences talk of moments of freedom within the misery of control, of how it is possible, in the moments in which freedom of ideas was not even thinkable, they, led ...