Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING in the Asian Review of Books

Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution by Moying Li

Karmel Schreyer
15/06/2008

Snow Falling in Spring is a memoir -- the story of MOYING LI's childhood in China. It is an idyllic beginning; her carefree days are spent with DiDi (little brother) and cousins running around the family's courtyard under the doting watch of extended family and like-family members. Then, one day, the adults, excited and preoccupied, no longer pay the children much attention, and the beloved sanctuary of the courtyard has been invaded by a horrible belching "backyard furnace". The Great Leap Forward has begun, and Moying Li's life will never be the same...

Like so many memoirs and works of fiction about this time and place, the author finds escape and solace and hope in books -- and especially in the Western classics. People are in fact risking their lives to read these now-forbidden stories, giving us startling proof, perhaps, of the value of literature. Secret reading clubs are formed, whole novels are copied out by candlelight -- all this will surely be inspiration for any reluctant reader to start looking at the classics in a new light (although if they are reading this book, they are certainly doing well in the book-loving department).

Moying writes how reading about Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, as well as Jack London's The Call of the Wild gave her, basically, the will to keep on living. Shakespeare was a struggle (she read in English, with a dictionary nearby) but could relate to the tragedies, such as King Lear: "Loyalty and betrayal, honesty and deception -- all of this had become so recognizable in my own world."

But the book-reading is just a small part of the story, of course.

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