Daughter of Good Fortune: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Memoir by Huiqin Chen with Shehong Chen (review)

Chen Huiqin’s memoir, Daughter of Good Fortune, provides a rare glimpse of life in rural China during the twentieth century. As Chen had few opportunities for formal education, Chen’s daughter, Shehong Chen, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, recorded her mother’s experiences and skillfully knitted them into a book that reads like a well-written autobiography. Beginning at her 1931 birth in Jiading (嘉定) County near Shanghai, Chen Huiqin chronicles her family’s experiences during China’s tumultuous years of war, occupation, revolutionary movements, and the drastic socioeconomic changes after the death of Mao Zedong.

One of the strengths of Chen’s memoir lies in her description of quotidian activities (meal preparation, work routines, and household management) as well as major life events (marriages, births, and deaths). Her narrative illuminates ways in which political upheavals of the Maoist era and economic developments under Deng Xiaoping affected the everyday lives of Chinese peasants, and it provides lived descriptions of changing trends and continuities in the recent past, such as educational opportunities, gender and family relations, urbanization, agriculture, health and medicine, property ownership, and ritual practices. Delia Davin’s short introduction and a limited number of footnotes by Shehong Chen provide context for those changes. Used in tandem with resources that explain national-level transformations within China, Chen’s localized personal history becomes an excellent resource for an advanced high-school or college-level classroom.

In the first four chapters, Chen relates her remembrances of war, occupation, revolution, and post-1949 developments including the beginning of collective agriculture. Some of her earliest memories involve fleeing and hiding from the invading Japanese armies beginning in 1937. These wartime upheavals, as well as the subsequent civil war, kept her from attending school; Chen remained largely illiterate throughout her life. Much of this section details what the expansion of Communist Party rule in the countryside meant for her family and neighbors. She explains how the land-reform movement, including class categorizations and redistributions of land and other property, “turned the old society upside down” (50). The Marriage Law of 1950 also had an impact in her village of Wangjialong (汪家弄) and on Chen herself. Her marriage, although unusual because it was matrilocal, was arranged by her parents through a matchmaker. Despite this, Chen says her marriage “was considered a new type” (60) since the new laws allowed her to inherit family property. [End Page E-1]

In the next section, Chen Huiqin describes the difficulties her family experienced during the Maoist period. She portrays long hours of fieldwork and the “unscientific farming methods” (91) officials forced collective farm workers to use as a part of the Great Leap Forward. Her description supports scholars’ findings that the policies of the period led not to increased output but instead to food shortages. Chen notes the extremes of the period, stating that even after the birth of a child she quickly returned to work in the fields because, “I was hungry and wanted to have access to supplemental food” (95). While the Great Leap Forward period was difficult, it was the Cultural Revolution that caused the greatest hardships for Chen and her family. She documents the emotional distress caused by not being able to practice traditional rituals at the death of her mother and the suffering and heartache surrounding the denunciations of her husband, a local cadre, and her father as counterrevolutionaries. Chen’s straightforward account adds to what we know about the chaos during the period from a different perspective than most memoirs written by the urbanized, educated elite.

The last chapters of the book describe the vast economic and cultural changes the Chen family experienced in the post-Mao years. Work in collectives ended, limitations on traditional practices eased, and the family experienced growing economic prosperity and rapid urbanization. Chen’s children received schooling. Two...