Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation (review)

500 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 cases this device means that the user must look up each organizational designation in the table ofcontents to see what it refers to. A rather cumbersome approach. In terms of accuracy, there is no way to judge this volume without using it very extensively. Spot checks revealed errors only of omission, not of commission, but detailed use by many researchers will provide the best test of the extent to which errors offact have crept into the text. In sum, this is a remarkably wide-ranging volume. It provides the material with which to trace organizational changes and personal careers for nearly eight hundred organizations and over ten thousand individuals for a period of a quarter century (and some of the notes permit reconstruction ofa portion of the changes that occurred during 1966-1968 as well). One can find fault with some of the basic decisions on the organization ofthe material, but the overall result is a valuable volume that provides a wealth ofinformation in reasonably accessible form. Those who deal with China are again in Malcolm Lamb's debt for his painstaking reconstruction ofa complex record. Kenneth Lieberthal University of Michigan Laifong Leung. Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers ofthe Lost Generation. Foreword by Jan Walls. Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. xliii, 392 pp. Hardcover $59.95. Paperback $24.95. In 1957, Mao Zedong told a group of Chinese students that they were China's future , "like the sun at eight or nine in the morning." Now, in twenty-six interviews , Laifong Leung shows how some ofthe best and brightest ofthis sunny generation passed, between the late 1950s and the late 1980s, through stages of idealism, doubt, disillusionment, disgust, anger, reflection, cynicism, and finally rededication. They went from adulating Mao to excoriating him. On the whole, however, their dramatic change ofoutlook was not due to shifts in basic values. They remained for the most part loyal to the ideals offreedom, fairness, and opportunity , and opposed to repression, bureaucratism, corruption, and poverty.© lqqs h tt · What changed them during thirtyyears ofhard experience was their deepening ofHawai'iPressunderstanding ofChina's actual condition. Theylearned that the People's Communes were governed not by fairness and mutual concern but by the authoritarianism ofbureaucrats, who bullied and sometimes committed crimes like rape. Reviews 501 Peasants were not reaping bumper crops but boiling tree bark and sometimes dying anyway. "Serve the people" and other nice-sounding slogans were at best tools for manipulating people, and at worst nothing more than systematic fraud. These discoveries did not subvert the original ideals of the writers Leung interviews so much as prove that the ideals had been wrongly invested. Most ofLeung's interviewees avoided utter despair by turning to Chinese tradition, to Western ideas, or to their own creativity to find alternate vehicles for their idealism. The strength of Leung's approach is that she views the literary work ofher interviewees just about as they themselves view it—as intimately intertwined with the problems of Chinese life. She did extensive reading ofher authors' works before doing her interviews, and her questions move easily among the writers' texts, lives, and worries for China. The interviewees usually come to life on the printed page, while the interviewer is helpful but not obtrusive. Leung avoids Western academic jargon and does not impose an agenda. The weakness of the book is its repetitiveness. Since the twenty-six interviewees were selected for their being illustrative of a generational pattern, the reader is led through variations on that pattern twenty-six times. For the purpose ofunderstanding the basic experience, a few ofthe stronger interviews—such as those with Shi Tiesheng, Wang Zhaojun, Zheng Yi, Wang Anyi, and Zhang Shengyou—would have sufficed. Leung could have given us a stronger overall book ifshe had taken a year or two more and had assembled her material analytically rather than alphabetically by author's surname. In her Introduction and Afterword, Leung shows that she is capable ofvery good analysis, but gives only enough to tantalize us. As it stands, the book will be most useful as a reference work. In addition to the interviews, Leung includes...