If you had rice you ate it. If none, you ate porridge. If no porridge, there were gourds and vegetables. If even that was beyond your power you could make do with elm leaves and edible herbs.
At first I thought that Gao Xiaosheng’s collection of short stories was merely propaganda, and then I did not—however I later realized I was wrong. Despite always seeming to have a happy ending, this collection of short stories is still worth the read. Particularly well written are the “Chen Huansheng” stories as well as “Fishing” and “Underwater Obstruction” as well as the piece from which the above quote was taken. All the stories deal in some way with Cultural Revolution era peasant life in China, idealizing it and making such a life seem sort of happy and yellow, a lot like Steinbeck’s treatments of the Salinas Valley, although nowhere near the same caliber.
Gao however does compose stories which are interesting. They seem at first to strike you as more propaganda from a government known for propaganda, but after you read further and begin to think about what is happening, the propaganda line doesn’t seem quite so natural. There are certain elements which though they may seem sweet, often end in an unsettling aftertaste.
I felt that the stories got better as you moved through this small anthology, although that might merely have been Gao’s style winning me over. Still, the first story, that for which the entire book is named, was certainly my least favorite. If you find yourself put off by this one, by all means skip ahead.
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