Daughter of Good Fortune: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Memoir

by Chen Huiqin, Shehong Chen (With), Delia Davin (Introduction)

Overview

Daughter of Good Fortune tells the story of Chen Huiqin and her family through the tumultuous 20th century in China. She witnessed the Japanese occupation during World War II, the Communist Revolution in 1949 and its ensuing Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Reform Era. Chen was born into a subsistence farming family, became a factory worker, and lived through her village’s relocation to make way for economic development. Her family’s story of urbanization is representative of hundreds of millions of rural Chinese.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295806020
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	04/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	8 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Chen Huiqin was born in 1931 in Wang Family Village, in Jiading Country near Shanghai, and now lives on her ancestral land. Shehong Chen is associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is the author of Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American. Delia Davin is emeritus professor of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Woman Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments by Shehong Chen

Introduction by Delia Davin

1. Ancestral Home

2. War and Revolution

3. Benefiting from the New Marriage Law

4. Rushing into Collective Life

5. The Great Leap Forward

6. “No Time for Meals All Year Round”

7. Years of Ordeal

8. Reaching Beyond Peasant Life

9. Changes in the Family

10. Farewell to Collective Life

11. Rural Customs and Urban Life

12. A House-Purchasing Frenzy

13. Crossing Borders and Leaving the Ancestral Village

14. Between the Living and the Dead

15. All Our Children Are “Plump Seeds”

16. Return to Ancestral Land

Glossary

Index

What People are Saying About This

Gail Hershatter

"This is a smoothly written and richly detailed memoir that reflects the changes in peasant life in the Shanghai suburbs from the 1930s to the present."

Jeremy Brown

"Daughter of Good Fortune illustrates the immense changes rural people have experienced since the founding of the PRC through today. It really is a worthy sequel to the classic account of peasant life in pre-communist China, Daughter of Han."

Editorial Reviews

"This book offers invaluable insights into the social history of rural China from a peasant perspective. Indeed, it reflects China’s history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and does so in a much more nuanced way than other Chinese memoirs available on the Western book market."

Nan Nu: Men

"Chen Huiqin’s memoir, Daughter of Good Fortune, provides a rare glimpse of life in rural China during the twentieth century."

Twentieth-Century China

"A faithful and meticulous transcription of her mother’s narrative. . . 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."

Pacific Affairs - Richard King

A faithful and meticulous transcription of her mother's narrative. . . 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 "Pacific Affairs"

Chen Huiqin's memoir, Daughter of Good Fortune, provides a rare glimpse of life in rural China during the twentieth century.

-- "Twentieth-Century China"

This book offers invaluable insights into the social history of rural China from a peasant perspective. Indeed, it reflects China's history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and does so in a much more nuanced way than other Chinese memoirs available on the Western book market.

-- "Nan Nu: Men, Women, & Gender in China"

From the Publisher

This book offers invaluable insights into the social history of rural China from a peasant perspective. Indeed, it reflects China’s history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and does so in a much more nuanced way than other Chinese memoirs available on the Western book market.

Nan Nu: Men