Woman from Shanghai

By Xianhui Yang

In Woman from Shanghai, Xianhui Yang, one of China’s most celebrated and controversial writers, gives us a work of fact-based fiction that reveals firsthand—and for the first time in English—what life was like in one of Mao’s most notorious labor camps.

Between 1957 and 1960, nearly three thousand Chinese citizens were labeled “Rightists” by the Communist Part and banished to Jianiangou in China’s northwestern desert region of Gansu to undergo “reeducation” through hard labor. These exiles men and women were subjected to horrific conditions, and by 1961 the camp was closed because of the stench of death: of the rougly three thousand inmates, only about five hundred survived.

In 1997, Xianhui Yang traveled to Gansu and spent the next five years interviewing more than one hundred survivors of the camp. In Woman from Shanghai he presents thirteen of their stories, which have been crafted into fiction in order to evade Chinese censorship but which lose none of their fierce power. These are tales of ordinary people facing extraordinary tribulations, time and again securing their humanity against those who were intent on taking it away.

Xianhui Yang gives us a remarkable synthesis of journalism and fiction—a timely, important and uncommonly moving book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 4, 2009
• ISBN: 9780307378354

Reviews for Woman from Shanghai

[blackdogbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

History is replete with examples of the human capacity for evil. Over the decades, Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and American internment camps have plumbed the depths of depravity. But in each of these sad places of wickedness and cruelty, there have always been stories of nobility and courage and survival. Xianhui Yang has collected thirteen such stories, all based on true accounts from survivors of the Chinese forced labor camp at Jiabiangou. Between 1957 and 19060, thousands of Chinese citizens labeled as Rightists were re-educated through forced labor. They were forced to live in one-room shacks or caves in large numbers and little food was available. After three years in the harsh desert, just five hundred survivors were relocated from the camps. Yang is spare and plain, straightforward to a fault. The style is both an asset and a liability. While the lives of these survivors are described in detail, the stories seem dulled. Yang’s account lacks the raw, volatile emotion of Elie Wiesel’s “Night” or Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” stories told by holocaust survivors. Though some moments in Yang’s tales carry an inherent shocking affect, the remainder of the story usually remains flat. Whether because of a cultural gap in narrative forms or because the stories are based on interviews with real survivors whose emotions were blunted in the experience, these stories seem to cry out for a more evocative style.Yang’s stories are important in a historical and anthropological sense. Even if they don’t make an immediate emotional connection, they still deserve attention, as they bear witness to the capacity of the human spirit for both good and evil.Bottom line: An important collection of stories for which the emotional content seems somewhat dulled for the subject matter.4 bones!!!!