[Looking forward to Saturday's seminar!]
In 1987 a translation of " Beijingren" was published in the West and was immediatedly a best seller. This book has a curious odyssey. In the 1960s Jan Myrdal and Gun Kessle wrote "Report from a Chinese Village". This was one of the earliest investigations into village life in the PRC [Hinton and Crook not withstanding]. In the course of their investigations they interviewed over fifty people about their lives in their own words.
In the United States this book influenced Studs Terkle to begin his oral histories, "Division Street", etc. This in turn influenced the development of the modern oral history movement. When Terkle's books was translated into Chinese they had an immediate impact. Two Chinese writers, Sang Ye and Zheng Xinxin, were influenced in turn to travel around China interviewing people in the mid 1980s.
Their stories were then published as a column in a New York Chinese-language paper the China Daily News. Later 58 of the stories were published in 5 different literary magazines in China. The results were electric!
The stories were of young and old , men and women telling about their lives in their own words and style. [ See particularly the women's stories: "Bandit turned housewife" (p. 20), "Her past" (p. 31), "Newlyweds" (p. 51), all of "States of Marriage" (3 stories), "Planningg her family" (p. 130), "Selling flowers" (p. 261), "Red guard" (p. 279), "Good looks" (p. 221), and "Dreams" (p. 347).
But read the whole book ...you will not be disappointed ![Edit by="mwhittemore on May 13, 4:44:57 PM"][/Edit]
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