Six Chapters Of Life In A Cadre School: Memoirs From China's Cultural Revolution

About the Book and Author Yang Chiang's Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School is a memoir of her two years of "reeducation" in the countryside during China's Cultural Revolution. A research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Yang Chiang studied Western literature at Oxford in the early 1930s and spent some time in Paris and Berlin" Before the Communist Revolution, she had been well known as a playwright and literary critic but afterward focused primarily on research work. In 1970, she was sent to a cadre school in Honan. Bypassing discussion of sensitive topics, the author focuses on daily happenings. Through seemingly irrelevant and minute details-the process of digging a well, clandestine visits with her husband, getting treatment for minor ailments, the puppy that she adopts-the author allows the reader to figure out the hidden meaning that she is trying to convey. Her chronicle of these mundane activities contains no complaints or polemics but is rather a telling commentary on the governmental system and its bureaucrats. What is left unsaid speaks louder than what is said. Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School was written during a brief liberalization period in the late 1970s and was published in Hong Kong in 1981. Within a few months it was republished both in China and Taiwan, a rare phenomenon in these politically sensitive times. There have been several translations into English, French, and Japanese, attesting to its popularity among non-Chinese readers. For this edition, the translator has provided extensive notes to clarify passages that would be obscure for Western readers and to explain the implications of literary, references made by the author. The translator, Djang Chu, is associate director and coordinator of academic affairs at the Institute of Asian Studies, St. John's University.