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.

Woman from Shanghai: Tales of Survival from a Chinese Labor Camp

Literature & Fiction

Yang, Xianhui

Contemporary

Pantheon

United States

Anchor

The Ditch maybe can give the lighter and lighter age and people in this age a head-on blow. Suffering has not walked far, and the witness of history is still alive. When we read in Escape, Luo Hongyuan failed his escape due to tiredness and gnawed a small piece of skull left by the wolf in desert, maybe death is no more merely a number, but the passing of a life equal to ours. In the Ditch, the cases of desperate struggle on the verge of death can be seen everywhere. No matter they died or survived, it was equally shocking by the sight. The truthfulness of the text shows us another living state beyond our lens. Besides shock, it may lead to more exploration into life, human nature and history.

The Ditch (Chinese Edition)

Guangdong Flower City Publishing House

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Books by Yang, Xianhui