秧歌

by Eileen Chang, 張愛玲

The first of the late acclaimed Chinese author Eileen Chang's novels to be written in English, The Rice-Sprout Song portrays the horror and absurdity that the land-reform movement brings to a southern village in China during the early 1950s. Chang's chilling depiction of the peasants' desperate attempts to survive both the impending famine and government abuse makes for spellbinding reading.

Genres: Fiction, China, Historical Fiction, Literature, Chinese Literature, Asia, Historical

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Eileen Chang is the English name for Chinese author 張愛玲, who was born to a prominent family in Shanghai (one of her great-grandfathers was Li Hongzhang) in 1920.

She went to a prestigious girls' school in Shanghai, where she changed her name from Chang Ying to Chang Ai-ling to match her English name, Eileen. Afterwards, she attended the University of Hong Kong, but had to go back to Shanghai when Hong Kong fell to Japan during WWII. While in Shanghai, she was briefly married to Hu Lancheng, the notorious Japanese collaborator, but later got a divorce.

After WWII ended, she returned to Hong Kong and later immigrated to the United States in 1955. She married a scriptwriter in 1956 and worked as a screenwriter herself for a Hong Kong film studio for a number of years, before her husband's death in 1967. She moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1972 and became a hermit of sorts during her last years. She passed away alone in her apartment in 1995.

Reviews

[Richard Burger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few days before I left China, a friend handed me two books by Eileen Chang, an author who for a long time had been on my list but who I never actually got around to reading. I read one of them, The Rice-Sprout Song, on my flight home from China nearly a month ago, and a day hasn't gone by that I haven't thought about it at least once. Although it came out in 1955 and there's no need for yet another review, I had to put down a few thoughts.

The Rice-Sprout Song is set in China's countryside during the early days of Mao's tyranny, when "land reform" promised the rural poor great hope that would soon lead to the horrors of collectivization, famine and death on a scale that was until then unimaginable. It's a desolate book about a terrible subject we all know about but have, in all likelihood, never truly experienced, hunger. Its metaphor for hunger is the watery gruel the poor eat for every meal as they slowly starve.

That this was Chang's first English novel is extraordinary, it is so perfectly crafted, its characters so real and the language assured and perfect. The book has two heroes, a "model worker" in the village, Gold Root, and his wife Moon Scent. After many pages of bleakness, we detect the first hints of joy in Gold Root's longing for Moon Scent, who has gone to work in Shanghai as a maid. He misses her so intensely he travels to Shanghai, his first time out of the countryside, to spend a few days with her, a sad event marked by Gold Root's sense of isolation and awkwardness, his crushing poverty contrasted by "bejeweled ladies going to parties in their shiny silk gowns and high-heeled gold shoes."

Chang tells how a cadre from the city is sent down to their village to live exactly as the peasants do and learn from them, and soon he, too, is starving. Only he has the resources to go to a nearby town and stuff himself with tea-boiled eggs, as he denies the hunger in his reports. He notes to himself that anyone who suggests there is truth to the whispers that the poor are starving will immediately be labeled a nationalist spy and put to death. Gold Root and Moon Scent are both doomed, victims of the insanity that grew out of Mao's policies. Gold Root is outraged that officials deny that the peasants are starving to death. He will soon pay for his insistence on speaking the truth, dragging Moon Scent down with him.

The oddest character in the book is the village's leading official, Comrade Wong, a jovial, likable man. Chang devotes many pages to humanizing him, telling how he met his beloved wife and how she left him, describing his loneliness and his knowledge that he will never rise from being a low-level functionary. We think Wong is a good man - and he probably is. But when the day comes that he meets with the starving peasants and tells them each must donate a pig as a gift to the army and prepare rice dumplings for the soldiers, we hate him with a passion. Gold Root cries out that they are literally starving, they have nothing. Wong beams with a wide smile and insists that surely they can accommodate this modest request for their country's brave soldiers. It is the high point of the book and it marks Gold Root's descent from "Model Worker" to an outraged, infuriated rebel clamoring for justice. Of course, he will soon be labeled a reactionary, and will be shot to death in the ensuing violence.

The words of my Chinese teacher in Beijing kept coming back to me as I read this book: her telling me how her family grew up hungry, and how no matter what the Chinese government did today, she and all other Chinese would feel unending gratitude that the days of hunger were over. Nothing matters when you are hungry; only food. Today, the Chinese people are no longer starving, and that shift, from starvation to having enough food on the table, was a seismic one. For anyone seeking to understand how the Chinese people can accept a government that censors, steals, enriches itself from the poverty of its people and thinks nothing of their human rights, I suggest they read this book. It doesn't touch on any of these topics per se, but it shows you all too vividly what life was like not so long ago (and Chang's account deals with China prior to the great famine; the horror was only just beginning). And then you look at China today, my teacher's China. No matter what we think of the government, hundreds of millions who were starving saw their situations turn around. For some 200 million or so, their poverty stayed the same or became even worse, but for the vast majority, it was a new world: they had food. As you read The Rice-Sprout Song, it becomes clearer just why the government today is given so much latitude, whether it was the CCP that put food on the people's tables or their own hard work once Mao's insanities were thrown on the rubbish heap where they belonged. When you have gone from generations of hunger to having food, you've undergone a sea change, a miracle. There has been no other turnaround like it in the history of civilization. So I understand what my Chinese teacher was telling me, whether I agree or not.

Corrupt officials still terrorize the countryside, and perhaps they always will; the exploitation of the marginalized by the powerful is history's oldest story. What this book does is make palpable the helplessness of China's rural poor, placing the reader in their freezing huts as the government's absurd decrees destroy their lives, chipping away at their dignity, ultimately killing them wholesale. In one of its most heartbreaking scenes, soldiers ransack their homes, stealing the very last bits of food they have hidden away. The peasants' calamity is complete; they have no recourse, no hope, nothing but their hunger.

If you've never read this book, which Chang wrote in English (another source of amazement), I urge you to get a copy. It can easily be read in a day or two, and it will leave you furious, anguished, dumbstruck and horrified. You'll hear the voices of its characters in your head for a long time to come, and no matter how well you already understand the famine and Maoism and land reform, you will feel like you are right there, living the insanity. That is not a comfortable feeling, but one that will make your compassion for the Chinese people richer and deeper than ever before.

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eileen Chang's "The Rice Sprout Song" was written in English and published in 1955 with support from the United States Information Service. The sponsors no doubt expected a strongly anti-Communist piece of propaganda. What resulted, to be sure, portrays the chaos and hunger of land reform in the first years of Communist power, but Chang was too subtle a writer and too interested in the complexities of human relationships, particularly those between men and women, to produce the black-and-white world propagandists might expect. Unlike Chang's earlier Chinese-language short stories and novellas, this work is set in the countryside, where the drama of land reform took place. The tragedy of this period, at least as Chang depicts it, is between two narratives--that of the Party, which must find victory and success in even the darkest realities, and that of poor peasants, who care less about ideology and policy than about simply finding something to eat. It is a compelling conflict, albeit less suited, I think, to Chang's subtlety than her largely a-political tales of love among the emergent urban middle class of Shanghai and Hong Kong.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

A buried masterpiece from the most beloved Eileen Chang.

张爱玲写官僚的平庸和残忍，写平凡人的细小的冷酷，写自然和光影，都是那么恰恰好，几乎读出俄罗斯文学的味道来，许多句子都叫人自惭形秽般的心惊。

[Alice Poon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is the first novel that Eileen Chang wrote originally in English with a later version in Chinese (秧歌). I chose to read the Chinese edition as I wanted to feel closer to the characters in the novel as well as to the author. Before this novel, I had never read any of her works, because as an adolescent I had preferred to read novels by the Taiwanese novelist Chiung Yao (瓊瑤).

The title of the novel refers to a festive folk song that used to be sung by villagers in the countryside to celebrate abundant harvests. It is oxymoronic when placed alongside the theme of the novel, which is about starvation and hunger. The novel is set against a backdrop where the land reform introduced by the Communist Party promised the rural populace great hope but soon led to the absurd collectivization scheme, starvation and death on a horrifying scale.

The author notes in the Epilogue that her story is based on an essay in the publication called People’s Literature, written by a young Communist cadre to record his eyewitness account of what had happened in the spring famine of 1950 in a North China rural village. He had been sent there to live exactly like the peasants and learn from them. While experiencing hunger himself, he noted that everyone was forbidden to utter the truth, i.e., the unbearable sufferings during a famine. Anyone who dared whisper the truth would be deemed a nationalist spy and arrested.

In the novel, hunger is described as “having for every meal a bowl of watery rice gruel with a few inch-long strips of grass floating on top”. Gold Root with his wife Moon Scent and daughter are just a typical family in the Tam Village silently bearing with crushing poverty and slow starvation until one day his deep-seated rage explodes. He fulminates against the village leader Comrade Wong for stubbornly denying that the peasants are starving to death. The climax comes when a hungry and furious crowd starts storming the government granary….

My heart remained tightly knotted for a long while after reading the novel. How I wish that the novel were purely fiction, but the mere thought would be sacrilegious to those who have had the misfortune to have a taste of what constant hunger is like.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

小说的结尾，舞动的秧歌队令人不寒而栗。

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chang opposed the Communist Party vehemently and attempted to portray the shortcomings of communism in this book through the lens of a rural village. Although what was written was very much true, one can't deny that Chang presented an exaggerated and biased view of the subject due to her political views.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing description of life in Maoist China and how people were expected to live off of faith, not food.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

devastating.

[Morris Yen · Rating 5 out of 5]

well written, show the suffering of Chinese farmers.

[Daisy Hoo · Rating 5 out of 5]

譚大娘，飯都吃不飽了還看書。我是真的吃很飽。但是我願意幫忙分擔半隻烤豬和四十斤年糕。等大家都吃飽了，我們就可以不用因為能勞動而結婚了。

[Vanonearth · Rating 4 out of 5]

「飢餓的滋味他還是第一次嘗到。心頭有一種沉悶的空虛，不斷的咬嚙著他，鈍刀鈍鋸磨著他。那種痛苦是介於牙痛與傷心之間，使他眼睛裏望出去，一��都成為夢境一樣的虛幻......」

「他眼看著自己一天比一天瘦下來，他最擔憂的就是這一點。參加過土改的人都誇口說，在鄉下過三個月，都長胖了。」

「那生活雖然苦，只要思想搞通了，你反而會胖起來的。」

[Mae · Rating 4 out of 5]

幢幢鬼影。

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it hard to get into Eileen Chang’s 1955 novel, written in English, _The Rice Sprout Song_. Though she had been an urban writer, the portrayal of villagers attempting to follow the party line is credible. I did not find any direct links between land reform and the pervasive hunger. Rather, it appeared to me that the Maoist regime was siphoning off what was produced by both taxes and forced contributions (to support the families of Red Army soldiers) that reduced the peasants to constant hunger (even before the “Great Leap Forward” produced full-scale famine). The US had supervised land reform in occupied Japan and urged it on Taiwan, so even if Chang was producing propaganda for the USIA, deriding land reform would not have been a way to do so. (Moreover, she did not demonize the local communist official, Comrade Wong.)

Comrade Ku, sent down to observe rural life, sneaking off to supplement the local diet by buying things to eat in a nearby town is satirized rather gently, at least until the screenplay he is writing is summarized near the end. The backbiting among the peasants did not originate with the triumph of communism, but certainly did not stop with it. Moon Scent, who has returned to “produce” after three years of being a maid in Shanghai, is distressed to learn that the advertised prosperity of the post-revolutionary countryside is a lie. She attempts to navigate the practical and ideological difficulties of life in the new (Potemikinish) paradise with her model worker (“new man”) husband Gold Root. She fails honorably, even as Comrade Ku succeeds dishonorably.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eileen Chang suffered the Chinese curse of living in interesting times. She grew up in the wild Shanghai of the thirties, made her name as a novelist in the war-torn forties (Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" is based on her writing), and was married to a collaborator with the Japanese, eventually immigrating to the United States. "The Rice Sprout Song" is from the fifties, an examination of early Maoism in the countryside from this very urban writer, and evidently the first book she wrote in English. Chang's vision of Mao's land reform of the fifties is clear-eyed and sobering. Her Maoist leader loses whatever revolutionary romanticism and nobility he once had (I cannot help but think of those seventies radicals who so chicly wore Mao jackets and purchased the Little Red Book or the poetry); her peasants starve and despair ragefully; a writer is sent to the village to make his work more propagandistic and less artistic, which he succeeds in accomplishing. Chang's vision is all the more chilling for the ways in which the language of revolution is harnessed to the same old centralism, with an old Revolutionary instead of the mandarin, Mao instead of an emperor, red sloganeering instead of the books of Confucian maxims, but all more modern and lethal, with guns instead of swords.

[Estekke · Rating 5 out of 5]

太阳像一只黄狗拦街躺着。太阳在这里老了。

为什么？怎么收成这样好，连饭都没得吃了？

他把那被窝使劲一扯，差一点把她和孩子都拖翻在地上。然后……她非常诧异——他竟一声不响着吹灭了灯，和衣躺下来。仿佛被窝盖与不盖，完全置之度外了。他这样躺着，很久很久没有睡着。很想翻过身去抱着她，既然喝不到酒、就用她来代替，用那温暖的身体来淹没他的哀愁。但是他自己心里觉得非常羞惭，因为他的贫穷，无用。他想起那些老笑话，说一个穷人，饿着肚子还要去缠着他的老婆，被老婆奚落一顿。也许她也会嘲笑他的。将近午夜的时候，她确实知道他睡着了，方才把棉被分一半给他盖上，又在黑暗中摸索着，给他把被窝塞塞紧。于是他在睡梦中伸过手臂去拥抱着她，由于习惯。


“怎么会放起枪来的？”金花又追问。 “唉。不用提了。大家起哄，说是要借粮，借粮，借点粮食过年，这里就放起枪来了。”她又很轻松似的加上这样一句，用一极明快的表情望着金花，“阿招死了。给踩死了。” “什么？”金花神情恍惚地问。 “我们也不相信呀，一路还把她带着。背着她上山——死了！早已死了。”她继续用那种稍带惊异的明亮愉快的眼光望着金花。 她又告诉她民兵怎样放枪，大家堵在粮仓门口拚命往外挤，那时候身不由己，只好也跟着大家挤了出来，但是一经脱身，立刻又住回跑，去找阿招。她挣扎着通过那迎面冲过来的人群，一怕次次地被撞倒了又爬起来。突然被一个人抓住她的手腕，拖着她就跑。是金根，他把阿招背在肩膀上。他们手牵手跑着，只听见那一颗颗枪弹呜呜叫着在耳边飞过，发出那尖锐的哀鸣。前后左右不断地有子弹落在地下。她从来没有像这样自己觉得有一个身体，仿佛混身都是寒飕飕地暴露在外面，展开整大块的柔软的平面，等待着被伤害。但是同时又有一个相反的感觉，觉得不会当真被伤害，因为他们这样手牵手跑着；像孩子在玩一种什么游戏。


但是顾冈仍旧在心里诅咒着。他怅然望着那渐渐低了下去的火焰。仓库已经被吞吃得干干净净，只剩下一个骨架子。那木头架子矗立在那整大片的金色火焰中，可以看得清清楚楚。巨大的黑色灰渣像一只只鸟雀似的歇在屋梁上。它们被称作“火鹊、火鸦，”实在非常确当。这些邪恶的鸟站成一排，左右瞭望着，把头别到这边，又别到那边，恬静得可怕，在那渐渐淡下去的金光里。

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

a short book only 185 pages or so. it took about one third of reading to actually want to continue even though Eileen writes in a lyrical style. I imagine writers like musicians, and she always has phrasing that pleases, however it is story that ultimately allows a reader to abandon or continue the adventure.

So I plowed along the path of words. Right about the time I started to lose interest was about the time the story got interesting oddly enough. You can tell the author never suffered like lots of people who lived through any famines because her incidents are imagined and contrived, nonetheless I ultimately enjoyed this book. A minor achievement for an accomplished author, her phrasing is pleasing.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first Eileen Chang novel I've read and I really enjoyed her writing style. The story was criticized in China as anti-Commmunist propaganda, but I don't see how famine can be politicized. Even though Chang wrote this book in 1955, three years before the Great Leap Forward, one of China's worst famines, it's like a warning of what was to come. I can't wait to read more of her books, especially those set in Hong Kong and Shanghai before 1949.

[Joni · Rating 2 out of 5]

A classic novel of the cultural revolution and the great famine in the 1950's and the effect all of this upheaval has on one Chinese peasant family. Well written with excellent characterization but a hurried ending.

[Kribib · Rating 5 out of 5]

所有書的類型中，小說最讓我有讀下去的慾望。老一輩總喜歡講以前的日子多麼難過，又是怎樣盼望著過年才能吃到的白面饅頭，我能夠想像但是沒辦法感同身受，這本書讓我想去了解歷史。

[密锌锡田 · Rating 5 out of 5]

張愛玲真的看的很透徹啊，難怪她早早離開了中國。

[Ftj Fsj Nvf · Rating 4 out of 5]

特权 饥荒 谎言 间谍 直到现在都没有什么改变

[Ming Kahnawake · Rating 5 out of 5]

这是张写的关于1950年中国土改后的某个不典型的乡村的生活。农民由个体走向了公社。之前的“打土豪、分田地”把土地分给了农民。但是建国后，政府把农民刚得到的土地“又从他们手里夺过来，”收回去，变成公有。农民依旧辛辛苦苦地耕作，但是收成交了公粮之后，还要交各种“爱国运动”的帐；所剩无几，饥寒度日。但是，天天还要扭秧歌、唱喜歌“多亏了解放，才过上了今天的好日子。”因搜刮过甚，激起民变，王同志不得不率同民兵对粮仓中抢粮的老百姓放枪，民众逃散。事后为求卸责，声称是“反革命份子”所为。曾经的劳模金根一家，女儿在抢粮的混乱中被踩死，金根被打伤，为免祸延妻子，他趁隙投水自尽。一无所有的媳妇月香复逃回两夫妻的家中。当晚有个女人烧掉了村中的粮仓，自己也被民兵赶入火海之中。王同志又征了一笔钱善后，下乡寻找题材的剧作家顾冈利用整个故事写成了剧本。
胡适于一九五五年一月二十五日给张爱玲的信中说：此书从头到尾写的是“饥饿”，——书名大可以题作“饿”字，——写的真细致，忠厚，可以说是写到了“平淡而近自然”的境界。张爱玲曾到苏北农村采风，和丁玲他们一样，准备大笔挥毫，书写新时代的凯歌。她在乡下看见了真实的百姓生活。她当时没有写，直到1955年她到了美国，才写了这本书。故事不长，文字极其朴实，完全不同于她的上海滩小说。“ 说乡下人都在饿肚子，这话是对谁也不能提起的，除非他不怕被公安局当作“国特造谣”给逮了去。”张爱玲在本书中几乎没有尖酸刻薄，不过就是实话实说：“XX党虽然是唯物主义者。但是一讲到职工的待遇方面，马上变成百分之百的唯心主义者，相信精神可以战胜物质。尽管工作时间特别长，但是照样还是可以精神焕发，身体健康。”这个一点不过时，就像我今天看到的一篇大论“炒股不要只想着赚钱。”秧歌从此在我心中，变成了另一种哀歌。
在冷峻的素描中，是灰色的现实，曾被否认存在过的现实。几十年后，终于有这些事件的历史结论得到确认；这篇小说却始终没有机会进入大陆，现在就更无可能。故此写了很长的内容简介。张爱玲的出走他乡也许有这作为其中的一条理由。她看得太明白，活得太清醒。也盖因为如此，她可以在美国活到75岁，没有被批斗或者投湖。

[Brady Turpin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chang is an incredible author, but I don't think this was her best work. The story of how it came to be is interesting and adds a deeper layer to the story for sure. While this is clearly an anti-Communist novel that paints the worst of the Great Leap Forth, Chang's literary skills do shine through and make a sad story beautiful.

[Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

以慈悲而冷静的观察描写心理活动，这是很多作品比不上的。即使是《活着》，也并没有张那样顾及到每个人的理性动机，显得稍微有点脸谱化。伟大作品中是没有脸谱的，每个人做事的动机都自然而然。

[Ryo · Rating 5 out of 5]

1. 交公粮 缴军鞋 支前捐款 合作社给不合格的麻染色；
2. “他除了党以外，在这世界上实在是一无所有的了”；
3. “如果吃不了一点苦就变瘦了，那显然是思想还没搞通，下意识里还在那里抗拒着，不愿意改造”；
4. 顾冈将现实魔幻化的创作心路历程，意志从薄弱转向坚定，人性逐渐丧失。

[Shiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

日本人來了，和平軍來了，國民黨來了，共產黨來了。

[agnes ୨୧ · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5)

[filminthesea · Rating 3 out of 5]

完全令人心驚，在「飢餓」一題上仔細著墨，使人物心理與時代自然融合，形成強大的壓迫力。

仔細讀了「跋」，《秧歌》中的人物與素材大多由張愛玲以往所閱讀過的人民日報或影視作品而來，想來《秧歌》自然成形的心理壓迫與真實殘酷的下鄉生活，再經由張愛玲精巧的文字過濾，便成此一佳作！

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it in one sitting - good prose and a saddingly accurate reflection of what life was like in rural China during the civil war. Preface was helpful as well.