Autumn Leaves

The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution By Chen Jo-hsi Indiana University Press, 220 pp., $8.95 The first book available in English of dissenting literature from Communist China! Eight stories by a Chinese woman, a respected author in Taiwan, who went to the Mainland with Maoist enthusiasm in 1966, just in time for the earthquake called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and who managed to escape, heartbroken, in 1973.

An odious adolescent Red Guard leader hectors a country town into executing his uncle, the major, a loyal Communist and a decent old man. Parents are scared stiff at what might happen if people ever found out that their four-year-old was taunted into shouting “Chairman Mao is a rotten egg!” Two beaten-down intellectuals struggle through a wretched life of hackwork and menial labor on a dismal collective farm. An apartment house full of people turns itself upside down trying to trap the only sexy woman for miles around with one of her lovers. A tyrannical leftist young woman is herself brainwashed so harshly, after the line shifts, that she drowns herself in a cesspool. An intellectual returned from America can’t marry his proletarian true love because he is suspect, and then isn’t allowed to marry a nice widow because her family is suspect: he can console himself only with Mutton Fire Pot, a finer dish than Peking Duck. When American newsmen with the Nixon party rush through Nanking, poor people in a suburb are pressured into taking down their unsightly drying racks, lest the newsmen see them and discredit China. Meanwhile an old man buys a fine fish for his sick wife, but it is taken from him and put back on the counter so that the newsmen may see how much food is available in China.

FR

About the Author

Francis B. Randall

Featured Tags

The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution By Chen Jo-hsi Indiana University Press, 220 pp., $8.95 The first book available in English of dissenting literature from Communist China! Eight stories by a Chinese woman, a respected author in Taiwan, who went to the Mainland with Maoist enthusiasm in 1966, just in time for the earthquake called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and who managed to escape, heartbroken, in 1973.

An odious adolescent Red Guard leader hectors a country town into executing his uncle, the major, a loyal Communist and a decent old man. Parents are scared stiff at what might happen if people ever found out that their four-year-old was taunted into shouting “Chairman Mao is a rotten egg!” Two beaten-down intellectuals struggle through a wretched life of hackwork and menial labor on a dismal collective farm. An apartment house full of people turns itself upside down trying to trap the only sexy woman for miles around with one of her lovers. A tyrannical leftist young woman is herself brainwashed so harshly, after the line shifts, that she drowns herself in a cesspool. An intellectual returned from America can’t marry his proletarian true love because he is suspect, and then isn’t allowed to marry a nice widow because her family is suspect: he can console himself only with Mutton Fire Pot, a finer dish than Peking Duck. When American newsmen with the Nixon party rush through Nanking, poor people in a suburb are pressured into taking down their unsightly drying racks, lest the newsmen see them and discredit China. Meanwhile an old man buys a fine fish for his sick wife, but it is taken from him and put back on the counter so that the newsmen may see how much food is available in China.