Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING in the Taipei Times

A child's view of the 'Great Leap'

Moying Li's new memoir details her experiences growing up during China's Cultural Revolution, which she says gave her a hunger for education.
By David Mehegan
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, BOSTON
Sunday, Jun 15, 2008,Sunday, Jun 15, 2008, Page 14

Once upon a time in faraway China, a little girl lived with her father and grandparents in a house with a courtyard in Beijing. She was happy, playing with her schoolmates and little brother. Then hard times came. She lived through them safely, grew up, and came to the US to study. Now she lives happily with her husband in a house with a courtyard on Beacon Hill, in Boston.

That’s the story of Moying Li, 53, author of the just-published Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution. Published in the young-adult category, the book is written in a style that could appeal as readily to adult readers. It begins with China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 and ends in 1977, with the 26-year-old English student crossing the Luohu Bridge into Hong Kong en route to a flight that will take her to a new life in the US.

There are many accounts of the Cultural Revolution, which ravaged Chinese society from 1966 to 1976. What sets Li’s witness and memory apart is its simplicity, lack of clutter or moralizing. It is almost entirely about relationships, with little of politics or history. She does not look back in anger. “I see it in a Taoist way,” she said in an interview at her home. “The good and the bad are part of each other, somehow. Even though I and my generation went though hard times, without it I wonder if we would have gained maturity and reflection. In one sense, the experience of the Cultural Revolution has become to me a strength.”

Li’s mother, assigned to teach in another city, was often absent, so the key adults in the child’s life were her father, who was a screenwriter for an army film bureau and a book lover, and her dynamic grandmother. Both lavished warmth on the two children, and encouraged them to be students and readers. But they were not immune from the troubles around them. In the late 1950s, the family built a backyard furnace, part of a delusional national campaign to build a steel industry that would overtake the productivity of the West. That and other policies of national mismanagement led to failure and famine.

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