Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. xii, 348 pp. (B&W photos, map.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-99492-5.
Biographies of women of the subaltern classes in China are few and far between. It is seventy years since Ida Pruitt wrote Daughter of Han, her transcription of the life story of a poor woman from the end of empire, through Japanese occupation and Nationalist government, to the eve of Communist victory. Daughter of Good Fortune is, like Pruitt’s book, a detailed memoir dictated by a woman of limited literacy to a sympathetic amanuensis, in this case a daughter. Chen Huiqin’s account begins around the time Daughter of Han left off and runs through to the time of writing.
Chen Huiqin is an archetypal beneficiary of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, the movement started in the early 1980s that disbanded the People’s Communes of the Mao era, permitting farming on an individual or family basis, and encouraging industrial enterprise at the local level. Chen Huiqin, from Jiading County on the outskirts of Shanghai, is a member of the class that was once categorized as peasants, but she, and many of her neighbours, realized their dream to become urbanites, with the security and state support that new status entailed, through hard work and entrepreneurial spirit. She and her husband, a former Communist Party official, endured the turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s, rode the reform wave and the real estate boom of the last two decades of the twentieth century, and now find themselves modestly prosperous, living in an elegant modern townhouse complex, their children educated and successful, and able to enjoy their old age at a level of comfort their forbears could never have imagined.
The book is a memoir of village life seen in microcosm: the momentous historical events intrude and influence, but the focus is on the daily life of Chen Huiqin and her family. In the hard times of the early years of the People’s Republic, it is Chen Huiqin who holds the family together, with help from her parents, while her husband is away on Party business; the story cuts, sometimes abruptly, between details of work and events in the life of family members, as they are important to her. Later in the memoir, as family fortunes improve, profitable business ventures and home improvements are described in considerable detail, along with the increasingly elaborate family occasions of the newly rich. However good things get, however, Chen Huiqin is not one to relax completely: “I tried everything to increase income,” she writes, “it had become a habit for me not to lose an opportunity to make money” (210). And as much as she admires her business-owner son’s generosity towards his employees, she expresses concern that he might be giving away more than he really should.
In Daughter of Good Fortune we see none of the romanticism about the peasantry that characterizes writings dating from the years of Chinese socialism. After describing her eighteen-year-old daughter’s arduous labour on a Mao-era public construction project in winter, something that might previously have been represented as glorious shared endeavour, Chen Huiqin comments: “Peasant life was too harsh” (162). There is also surprisingly little attachment to ancestral dwelling-places: when land is developed for industry or housing and the chance comes to get away, “[m]ost rural people in our area hoped that their village or house would be in the zone of rural expansion so that they would be relocated” (270). What remains constant is a tenacious devotion to the traditional rituals and ceremonies of family life, particularly weddings and funerals, even at times when such observances are frowned upon. In the austere atheism of the Cultural Revolution, when burials and funerals are prohibited, Chen Huiqin and her husband set up an altar at home to mourn her mother with appropriate reverence before heading off to the crematorium; and the perfunctory weddings of those days, with their simple gifts of candy from the bride and groom, are regarded with disdain, and contrast sharply with the narrator’s relish for the elaborate wedding of a granddaughter in the twenty-first century. Though Chen Huiqin’s husband was a Communist official, religion rather than political ideology predominates: she is a devout woman who daily burns incense and chants the name of Amitabha Buddha, and who continues “to hold the traditional rituals to remember our ancestors and pay respects to Heaven, Earth, and bodhisattvas” (281).
Chen Huiqin’s good fortune includes having as a daughter a professor at an American university who embodies the traditional virtue of filial devotion. In this labour of love, Shehong Chen appears to have produced a faithful and meticulous transcription of her mother’s narrative. In doing so, she has done a great service not only to Chen Huiqin, but also to readers who would like to understand the transformation of village life currently underway in China.
Richard King
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
pp. 649-651