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Spider Eaters Rae Yang says the writer Lu Xun once gave the name spider eaters to some imaginary innovators who tried eating the insects but gave up when they found they tasted bad. People learned from that experience, he wrote, so their experiment was a useful service. In the same way, Rae Yang says, no one needs another Cultural Revolution. China and the world now know the frightfulness of such a movement. There is still a small but steady stream of chilling Cultural Revolution memoirs, of which this is one. It is a safe bet that the majority of Chinas intellectuals now in their 40 s and 50 s have similar memories.
Some were able to emigrate to the West; many are still in China and some still in the hardship posts to which they were exiled in 1968. But even those who moved on to a more fulfilling life abroad are haunted by their experiences. Rae Yang's book reads like an account of the past written by someone still obsessed. As a child in the 1950 s, her parents were diplomats, attached to the Chinese office in Berne. She was looked after almost entirely by Aunty, a nanny whom she adored, whom her parents brought from China. Rae Yang's forebears had been a mixture of officials and successful businessmen.
Though her father had left home to join the communists, his background was always suspect, and her uncle fell victim to the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the 1950 s. That episode is a good example of the hidden destruction wrought by political campaigns, because though he survived decades of work in the salt fields, when he returned to Beijing in the 1980 s, his personality was so damaged he could no longer relate to his family. Rae Yang herself, as a Red Guard and perpetrator of brutalities, tells horrendous tales of the Cultural Revolution. Most interesting are the thought-processes of the teenagers like her who one day was obedient pupils in school and the next vicious, fanatical tyrants bludgeoning others to death. These children were brought up to believe Mao was a god, and when he called for revolution, they gladly obliged. Even Zhao Yang, then party secretary of Guangdong Province and later Chinas party head, in 1966 submitted to an interview by Rae Yang's group.
Little did I foresee, she writes, that twenty-three years later sitting in front of a TV I would consider him one of the best Chinese leaders who did not want to kill people at Tiananmen... This private fantasy life is only a mirror of the larger psychological drama that is about to burst into view as the Cultural Revolution. In the summer of 1966 Mao harnesses the vast, conflicted energies of Yang's adolescent generation, appealing to their sense of duty and their longing to become one with the revolutionary generation they missed. Yang and the other students, who would otherwise be competing for grades, suddenly have the chance to become true revolutionaries; as Red Guards they begin to make revolution in the schools and the streets. It is a sweet time of freedom from old duties (no more classes, no more books, no more teachers dirty looks) as the students take to the streets to smash the Four Olds and then, bored and uncertain what to do next, begin to travel in groups through the countryside. Falling Leaves and Spider Eaters have similar ideas of development of Chinese culture.
Despite their superficial similarities both are true tales of a young womans life in the wake of the upheavals of Chinas twentieth-century revolutions, both have been compared (erroneously) to Jung Feng's Wild Swans-who books could not be more dissimilar. Falling Leaves, subtitled The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter, is the tale of a child, told by a woman who in many ways remains that child for her entire life. While much of the story takes place in the context of the major moments in modem Chinese history, China itself serves merely as the backdrop to a wholly personal tale. By contrast, Spider Eaters is a political memoir first and last.
Rae Yang's aim is to show how the passions of the political realm and the specific incidents of Chinese history have shaped her life. Yang perfectly illustrates the absurd and bitter ironies of the students attempts, often quite random, to reform society. Once, she and her friends accost a group of train passengers and try to shame them into giving up their seats to poor peasants- but they are argued out of their position and must finally resort to violence to save face. Another time they order that all privately owned shops and restaurants...
go out of business but are humiliated to discover that the private owners want nothing better than to be taken over by the state, so that they can relax in the sinecure of state employment. Yang shows us how easily things turn from the absurd to the horrifying when these young Red Guards, so earnest and so foolish, find themselves savagely beating a man to death and later pretending that they thought him a counterrevolutionary spy when he taunts their chastity by dropping his trousers and displaying his penis. Yang has the astonishing ability to write in the first person but to shift register from the matter-of-fact to the fantastical, from straightforward memory to stream of consciousness, to write as though she never had another thought beyond the one she had at fourteen, and to show the reader what she now thinks of her actions. In one stunning chapter (Semitransparent Nights) she recalls how she renamed herself Red Army and tried to experience the founding moment of the revolution (and thus to become a member of the first revolutionary generation) by walking the entire route of the Long March. She is able to make the reader feel the childs passionate need to use her body recklessly to create an authentic political self.
She is also able, through the ironic reflection that creates the underlying structure of the whole book, to show us the hollowness of the political and cultural milieu that made emulation and self-immolation, rather than innovation, the only authentic political self toward which she could aspire. Although she fails in her attempt to walk the Long March route, Yang is still under tremendous emotional pressure to live the right revolutionary ideals. Finally, she volunteers to give up her prized Beijing citizenship and go to the countryside to work with the real peasants on a pig farm. It is there, in a carefully constructed denouement, that she is finally exposed to some unpleasant truths: the peasants are not the pure revolutionaries she thought they were, the great famine of the 1950 s was not a triumph of socialist planning and the actual economic underpinnings of Communism are not so different from the unjust systems that had preceded thermal the non-volunteer peasant women in the region are defined as stinking dependents so that the state does not have to pay them the same wage as the men.
Much of the book covers the years Rae Yang spent in the countryside, for which she volunteered in 1968. At Cold Spring in the swamps of northern Heilongjiang, there were long, icy winters, food shortages and 24 hours of work a day. Here she began to grow up, to question the ethics of what the Red Guards had done, to learn about sex, to wonder about the village officials who had been held up as models. Surprisingly, they turned out to be as greedy, corrupt and vicious as anyone in the old society despite impeccable class status. Five years later, Rae had become a hardened farm laborer but horribly disillusioned. Her parents, by now rusticated to a rural cadre school for re-education, managed to bring her to join them.
This was the saving of her, since by tutoring they could make up for the years of schooling she had missed. They also taught her how to bribe officials, a skill which causes her shame but proved essential in finally getting to the United States. In the privacy of the long nights at the pig farm, Yang begins to reckon up the cost to society of her own actions in the Cultural Revolution and begins her final break with the regime whose emotional demands for revolutionary fervor have structured her life. Spider Eaters is not an easy book to read, but Yang's marvelous ability to write in the voice of a young girl without writing childishly, to recapture the almost sexual frenzy of the chaste Cultural Revolution, to make the reader believe (.
with the narrator) the unbelievable, makes it slip by almost too fast. No political novel I have ever readmit even Darkness at Noonhas made me so clearly understand the seductive nature of the political as this womans honest indictment of her girls life in China. But the story does not have a happy ending. Aunty, her grandmother and her mother all died as a result of the privations they suffered in the Cultural Revolution. Her father, to whom she thought she was close, swiftly married again and began a new life.
She now works as an assistant professor in East Asian studies at Dickinson College in the US, with a broken marriage behind her. Despite the tragedies, this is not a gloomy book. Rae Yang is a survivor. She writes well about her experiences in the belief that from it others may learn to avoid making political catastrophes. The reader can only hope she is right, reflecting on the personal suffering and loss to China of millions of loyal, clever people like her and her family brought about by Mao's destructive policies. Rae Yang's Spider Eaters is a memoir of youthful passions recollected in cold blood by a very precise and adult writer.
Yang's intentions are, from the first, public and political: she wishes to be, for us, a Spider Eater, a phrase coined by Lu Xun (1881 - 1936) that refers to those unknown ancestral heroes who, having tried eating something poisonous (in her case, the Cultural Revolution), have left us a record of their actions as a warning. Daughter of two diplomats, both devoted to the cause of Communism, Yang is raised in (relative) security and affluence. She goes to good schools, preparing, as she sees it, to become part of the glorious future of her country. In The Hero in My Dreams she writes brilliantly of the dominant role of fantasy in her teenage years.
She spends every waking moment in a shifting dream world in which her longing to be as revolutionary as her parents is dramatized: she is simultaneously the ideal chaste (male) hero of the revolution and his ideal chaste (female) sacrifice to the revolution. In the privacy of the long nights at the pig farm, Yang begins to reckon up the cost to society of her own actions in the Cultural Revolution and begins her final break with the regime whose emotional demands for revolutionary fervor have structured her life. Spider Eaters is not an easy book to read, but Yang's marvelous ability to write in the voice of a young girl without writing childishly, to recapture the almost sexual frenzy of the chaste Cultural Revolution, to make the reader believe (. with the narrator) the unbelievable, makes it slip by almost too fast. No political novel I have ever readmit even Darkness at Noonhas made me so clearly understand the seductive nature of the political as this womans honest indictment of her girls life in China.
Bibliography: Rae Yang. Spider Eaters: A Memoir. University of California Press, 1997. Will Finley. Chinese Cultural Revolution.
From National Geographic Magazine, issue April 2002. Yan Guzman. Contemporary Chinese Narrative. From Asian Affairs, Oct 99, Vol. 28 Issue 3, p. 405. Adolinc Yen Mah. Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter.
New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998.
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Research essay sample on Cultural Revolution Red Guards
