Youth Song

by Mo Yang

s Literature; 1 (July 1. 2005). People s Literature; 1 (2005

565 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

Reviews

[Smita Magar · Rating 3 out of 5]

With this book, I entered the world of communist-literature.
Was a gift from my brother Kush while i was reading in class 5. More than the communism theory, i was attracted to the world of literature with the help of this book...and because of it, I started writing poems, stories and articles.
Basically, it introduced me to literature and so holds special place in my heart.
I have read it at least five times and after that whatever I read from Russian and Chinese literature (translated in Nepali) is due to this books influence.

[Spandana · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is one of the china history based novel...amazing story..one of the must read book...inspiring story based on real things....
astonishing facts...mind u once u start the book u just cant tolerate any unavoidable breaks...so prepare for time before you start..

[Liam Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

What starts as a coming of age melodrama about a sensitive, suicidal teenager becomes a detailed examination of intensifying class struggle under the shadow of Japanese occupation. Tao-ching’s quest to join her young idols in the communist party brings her into contact with starving peasants, wannabe movie stars, bumbling (if well-meaning) liberal undergrads, and more than one devilish secret agent on the payroll of Kuomintang. By the novel’s climax, Tao-ching has succeeded - leaving behind the jealousy and dependence of a traditional marriage for the embrace of a tender comrade and the interdependence of Party politics. It’s hard not to share her joy by the time the December 9th demonstration erupts - even if she and her new lover end up beaten, bloodied, and facing down a line of grey, grimacing gendarmes. While the individual character portraits tip towards caricature, the novel conveys in almost every scene the thrill of conspiracy and the even greater joy of solidarity. It’s one for the reds in your life. Fellow travelers also welcome

[Joel Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is very useful because it teaches the reader, familiarizes the reader with the details of developing into a revolutionary. Reading, being ready to fight is not enough but we have to develop our skills to serve the masses, even in slow paces, in not so heroic-adventurous positions. We have to follow the party, and be ready to serve the revolution in a planned scientific manner, being ready to work in any role as the revolution requires. Revolution is shown as a very practical thing, with practical challenges to solve.

This is the story about a young girl Lin Tao Ching who is born as the daughter of a landlord father and peasant woman mother, who the landlord rapes. Rebellious against the injustices she faces at her home under a cruel stepmother, she rebels and slowly develops into a revolutionary. She is guided by her revolutionary friends, a part of the rising tide of revolution in 1930s China. The novel is set in the background of the invasion of China by Japanese Imperialism. The capitalist-comprador ruling government of China, the Kuomintang (KMT) decides to surrender territories to the foreign power and instead use its military resources to fight the communists, its “internal enemy”. This naturally angers the patriotic minded students, intellectuals and workers of the country.

The story takes place with transition from city to village and back many times. In the city we see the upper classes collaborating with Japanese invaders. In the countryside we see the brutal feudal exploitation of peasants, through extreme taxation, starvation, parents having to sell their children to eat food, etc…

Lin spent her childhood in Jehol village, then she went to Peiping city for studies. To escape marriage, she is forced to quit college and runs away to Yangchung village, where she finds work as a Teacher. Facing harassment for her patriotic views, she flees back to Peiping city to find work, where she marries her first husband Yung-tse. Due to strong ideological differences and patriarchal attitudes, she leaves yung-tse, starts work in a village as a teacher. Due to political work at the school, she is hunted by KMT authorities and flees to a nearby village, where she works for a Landlord as a teacher. Being hunted by the landlord, she flees back to Peiping city, where she is given revolutionary work, one of which involves fixing the student movement in the city.

Lin’s first radicalization happens in the first village where she works as a teacher. She meets Lu Chia Chuan there, the cousin of a staff member, who agitates her about the Japanese invasion of China.

Lu-Chia Chuan, Lo-Ta Fang and Li-Meng Yu are the three main revolutionary student leaders in the novel. Lu-Chia Chuan guides Lin (the main character) many times throughout the novel. Lin has a crush on Lu chia chuan. But Lu dies in a kmt prison after being tortured.

This novel includes a lot of details for young people, especially students to find relatable and learn from. We can look through some examples.

In the chapter where Lin is first radicalized, Lin is worried about Japan’s invasion of China. She asks Lu about his opinions. Lu says, “Chiang Kai-Shek - sent - 1000s of soldiers to attack reds not Japan. Japan took 3 military factories, cities, areas, etc..” (concrete facts) Then the question, “Can China attack Japan without armed struggle?” (question).
Lin: “I don’t know”
Lu: “You should, right?”
Lin: ::feels embarrassed::
Here we see that Lin, although embarrassed, has a seed of radical thinking planted in her mind; of concrete facts about the indignation faced by her beloved motherland, China. We should learn the ratio given here of concrete facts, abstract overview and question, as a good starting point for practical work.

The importance of concrete relatable life experiences is again shown in another scene where Lin’s best friend Hsiao-weng, who was not earlier inclined to politics when hearing Lin’s abstract arguments, suddenly developed interest when she hears Lin’s concrete life experiences about the destitution of poor peasants in the countryside.

Later, Lin starts reading Lenin, Dialectics,etc… She feels extremely happy while doing this. She reads continuously for days. In a later scene, when Lin starts being like “Marxism has opened my eyes”, etc.. Lu Chia Chuan is like, “Do you even know what is going on concretely right now? like where our red army has won,etc..?” and Lin is like, ”uhm, i feel bad, i should study concrete stuff also, not be solely satisfied in my reading of these abstract books”. She develops.

Then initially, Lin is like “I want to die for the revolution, immediately, my life is so useless till now”. Lu asks if she wants to die a hero, or she wants to serve the revolution, exposing her petty romanticism. Lin starts to develop further. She teaches in a village primary school. She teaches the children about being patriotic to China, books like the happy life of children in the USSR, role of the communist party of China in defending against Japanese Imperialism, etc.. She thus develops concrete skills to propagate the revolution.

Despite this, Lin still needs to develop her attitudes further and remove her upper class values.

There is a scene where Lin, while working at a Landlord's place as a teacher, faces a worker, who is quite indifferent to Lin, despite her repeated attempts. She learns that the worker is actually a former serf of her father, who had to sell her child daughter to survive. She nevertheless feels disappointed that she is unfairly targeted for her father’s crimes and complains about it to a senior comrade. The comrade, who is from a working class background, exposes her class values in this form of thinking. She thus gets more patience and tries more. Later in the end of the scene, it is seen that the worker had in fact developed sympathies for her and her activities. He helps her by risking his life to save her.

In another episode, Lin works for a washerwoman comrade. She feels that it is boring work, unrelated to doing revolution. She is puzzled & dissatisfied at being given this work by the Party. She nevertheless continues the work. This scene shows how revolution is a giant well organized machine with many moving parts and processes. Each one is necessary for particular situations , we must not look for only ‘glamorous’ work, but should keep in mind the need of the revolution as a whole as well.

Towards the end of the book, Lin is sent to work in the Peiping college, to fix weakening of the student organizations. She sees that a student comrade is trapped in “empiricism” - he says “these kinds of students are like that, they can’t be changed”. “They are liberals, middle way students”, etc.. Ironically, Lin herself also thought that this student would be static in this wrong thinking, but it is seen later when Lin shows that things can change, the student acknowledges the error in his thinking and starts to work on the correct strategy.

[Devendra Timla]

I read it nearly 30 years ago, which was translated into Nepali language. After that I read many other books. But it is still in first place in my mind.

[Gautam Bhatia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d bought Mo Yang’s The Song of Youth at the Delhi World Book Fair earlier this year, and then left it on my desk where it stared accusingly at me for many months. I took the advantage of a long flight to finally get around to reading it, and I’m glad I did. The Song of Youth is a novel about the Chinese student movement on the eve of the Chinese Revolution (it broadly covers the years 1929 - 1936), told from the perspective of a young, woman university student.

I’m going to be up front, and say that this book is not going to be for everyone. It was written in the 1950s. Its style, therefore, is peak socialist realism, didactic at times, and descriptive always. There is the obligatory praise of Mao’s tactics and strategies. And it is, of course, heavily ideological - although its ideology is the ideology of the revolutionary Communist Party, and not the Communist Party that subsequently became the single party of government. But all these things aside, I really enjoyed reading this book because, first of all, it’s well-written: there is continuous movement, the pace never drags (despite being description-heavy), and the Mo Yang is genuinely writing about a truly fascinating historical period. And secondly - leading on from my last point - this novel is a really interesting window into that period in China’s history that featured Kuomintang rule, Japanese aggression, the continuing presence of colonialism, and the rise of revolutionary movements. It’s an excellent complement to the book I’ve discussed recently in this newsletter - The Song of Arirang - which tells the same story, but from the perspective of a Korean revolutionary. Once you account for the biases, Song of Youth gives you a thorough grounding in the years that led to the shaping of contemporary China.

I had two problems with this book. One was that its ideology at times became too on the nose: not just communism, but Marxism-Leninism; making the protagonist read Lenin’s intra-left screed, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, was a bit much!

And secondly, you remember all those annoying books where the secondary characters are essentially ciphers, and vehicles for the protagonist’s development and evolution? Song of Youth does something similar, but in the reverse: it’s the protagonist who is a clean slate, upon which various committed revolutionaries write their thoughts and visions from time to time. In the beginning, I wondered if this reflected internalised misogyny, but later in the book we do find revolutionary women as well; it’s only the protagonist who seems to be perpetually inexperienced, and perpetually being explained things to by people with a more developed revolutionary consciousness. This is exhibited in particular by the repeated description of her smiling “naively” at something. There was a moment, on page 466 of the novel, when after many years in the revolution, she was still smiling naively, and I wanted to throw the book at the wall: how much longer will you be “naive” for? I do wonder if this is a translation issue, and if in the original Chinese it was perhaps something less pejorative (“smiling simply?”), but even otherwise, I don’t think Mo Yang does justice to her protagonist.

[Афина · Rating 4 out of 5]

Το "Τραγούδι της Νιοτης" της Mo Yang έχει όλες τις περιπέτειες που θα μπορούσε να ζήσει ένας κομμουνιστής την περίοδο της γιαπωνέζικης ιμπεριαλιστικης εισβολής στην Κίνα και την εμφυλια διαμάχη μεταξύ των Κόκκινων του Μάο Τσε Τουνγκ και των Λευκών εθνικιστών του Τσιανγκ Και Σεκ. Ετσι, η ηρωιδα, Λιν Ται-Τσινγκ, έρχεται αντιμετωπη με τη σαπια ηθική της επαρχίας, των μεγαλοτσιφλικαδων και των αστών σε μια σειρά από περιπέτειες και αποστολές που ως αποτέλεσμα έχουν το ξύπνημα της άνοιξης και την εξέγερση των φοιτητών ενάντια στο κατεστημένο αλλά και την Ιαπωνία. Διαβάζοντας το βιβλίο ακόμα και σήμερα μπορεί κανείς να διακρίνει τα προβλήματα του κομμουνιστικου κινήματος ίδια και απαράλλαχτα, καθιστοντας το "Τραγούδι της Νιοτης" ένα θεωρητικό πείραμα, στη θεση των πρωταγωνιστων του οποίου μπορεί ο καθένας να βάλει τον εαυτό του. Επιπλέον η γραφή της συγγραφέα έχει λυρισμό και επικοτητα, η οποία κορυφώνεται μέσα από το τέλος του βιβλίου που μ��ιάζει με έναν ανοιξιάτικο χείμαρρο που δε μπορεί να συγκρατηθεί. Ιδιαίτερα συναισθηματική, η Mo Yang δεν παρασύρεσαι από το στρατευμένο είδος που υπηρετεί, αλλά αφήνεται σε έναν ακραίο συναισθηματισμο που περιγράφει την ολοκλήρωση ενός ανθρώπου σαν βίωμα μέσα από την οργανωμένη πάλη για έναν καλύτερο κόσμο, με ελάχιστες "ξύλινες" εξαιρέσεις. Δυστυχώς δεν κυκλοφορεί ελληνική επανέκδοση και προσωπικά το βρήκα σε παλαιοβιβλιπωλειο. Ένα πραγματικό διαμάντι που σε εξοικειωνει με την κινεζική ιστορία και κουλτούρα αλλά και με τον αγωνιστικό τρόπο ζωής. Επος.

[Ajay S · Rating 5 out of 5]

an unapologetically communist novel <3

I once again have a lot to say but too tired to write a full review. i will leave a few notes for now. if i had finished this in 2025, it might have taken the crown for best book of the year. it was surprisingly relatable despite being about 1930s china.

[harshakugwe]

beautifully depicts the spirit of youth in the road to change society

[Sanju Baral · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I want my daughter to read one day! Also all ladies out there!