Yuan-tsung Chen's Books

The Dragon's Village

An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China

By: Yuan-Tsung Chen

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The Dragon's Village

An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China

By: Yuan-Tsung Chen

This extraordinary autobiographical story, compelling, candid, and deeply personal, plunges us into that tumultuous moment in China out of which the modern People’s Republic finally emerged. It is the first time a novelist has ever described that distant world in words that open it up to Western readers in the clearest, most vivid terms. Shanghai, 1949: we look through the eyes of Guan Ling-ling, a headstrong, idealistic seventeen-year-old. As her family departs for Hong Kong, Ling-ling boldly chooses to stay, and joins a revolutionary theater group which soon leaves the city to carry out the new reforms in the Chinese countryside. After a scant few weeks’ preparation, this city-bred schoolgirl suddenly finds herself in one of China’s most remote and impoverished areas, a world so far from her own experience that she can barely understand the lives she has been sent to change. On her very first night in Longxiang (“the Dragon’s Village”), a dusty hamlet far in the northwest, Ling-ling’s life is threatened by agents of a defiant landlord. From that moment on , an unrelenting flood of events engulfs her: plot and counterplot, acts of violence, midnight raids, dramatic personal revelations, even glimmers of first love, all set against a canvas of revolutionary upheaval. Chen carries us on an incredible voyage against China at a critical moment in modern history. No novelist has focused so clearly or so closely on the faces of revolution, or on the physical and social landscapes in which it was played out, from the urbane circles of Shanghai to the parched fields and desolate families in tiny Longxiang. We are wholly involved in Ling-ling’s struggle to assume the unfamiliar garb of soldier and teacher, and can recognize in it an adolescent’s painful path to maturity. Yuan-tsung Chen was born in Shanghai and educated in a missionary school for girls there. She has just graduated from high school in 1949, and soon went to work at the Film Bureau in Peking. In 1951, she joined she joined land reform workers in Gansu Province, the setting of this, her first book. It was the first of several agrarian campaigns in which she took part over the next twenty years.

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Page Count

341

Publisher

Pantheon

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307831949

ISBN 13

9780307831941

The Secret Listener

An Ingenue in Mao's Court

By: Yuan-Tsung Chen

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The Secret Listener

An Ingenue in Mao's Court

By: Yuan-Tsung Chen

A personal account of life in the orbit of Mao and Zhao En-Lai and one woman's effort to tell what it was like to be at the center of the storm.The history of China in the twentieth century is comprised of a long series of shocks: the 1911 revolution, the civil war between the communists and the nationalists, the Japanese invasion, the revolution, the various catastrophic campaigns initiated by Chairman Mao between 1949 and 1976, its greatopening to the world under Deng, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.Yuan-tsung Chen, who is now 90, lived through most of it, and at certain points in close proximity to the seat of communist power. Born in Shanghai in 1929, she came to know Zhou En-Lai - second only to Mao in importance - as a young woman while living in Chungking, where Chiang Kai-Shek'sgovernment had relocated to, during the war against Japan. That connection to Zhou helped her advance after the communists took power, and she obtained a job in one of the culture ministries after the revolution. While there, she frequently engaged with the upper echelon of the party and was afirst-hand witness to some of the purges that the regime regularly initiated. Eventually, the commissar she worked under was denounced in 1956, and she barely escaped being purged herself for exhibiting bourgeois tendencies. Sent to the countryside to further the revolution during the Great LeapForward of the late 1950s, she witnessed the mass starvation that ensued. Later, during Cultural Revolution, she and her husband were purged and sent to live in a rough, poor area-a common fate for many intellectuals. She finally escaped to Hong Kong in 1971.A first-hand account of what life was like in the period before the revolution and in Mao's China, The Secret Listener gives a unique perspective on the era, and Chen's vantage point provides us with a new perspective on the Maoist regime-one of the most radical political experiments in modernhistory and a force that genuinely changed the world.

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Page Count

305

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0197573347

ISBN 13

9780197573341

Return to the Middle Kingdom

One Family, Three Revolutionaries, and the Birth of Modern China

By: Yuan-tsung Chen

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Return to the Middle Kingdom

One Family, Three Revolutionaries, and the Birth of Modern China

By: Yuan-tsung Chen

The author chronicles three generations of her late husband's family, all of who fought against the injustices they encountered in their homeland of China.

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Page Count

436

Publisher

Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1402756976

ISBN 13

9781402756979

Book's by Yuan-tsung Chen

The Dragon's Village

The Dragon's Village

The Secret Listener

The Secret Listener

Return to the Middle Kingdom

Return to the Middle Kingdom

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