Growing Up in the People's Republic: Conversations between Two Daughters of China's Revolution by Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong (review)

This book is decidedly of value to anyone interested in contemporary China, but especially to the nonspecialist. Weili Ye teaches history and women's studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Xiaodong Ma teaches at the Institute for Population Research, Fudan University, Shanghai. Both did their graduate studies in the United States and are from families of high-level Chinese Communist Party elites. The subject of their book is their childhood and youth experiences during the late 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s—thus the title, Growing Up in the People's Republic. The principal author, Professor Ye, asked her friend, Professor Ma, to join her in the enterprise as an interlocutor in the oral history sections, giving rise to the subtitle, Conversations between Two Daughters of China's Revolution.

Using a chronology-based structure, the authors capably weave together the social and political trends of the 1950s and 1960s by showing how those tumultuous times impacted and shaped their lives as they developed through that period. Both women were born around 1950 into elite Beijing families and lived through the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution; during the last, they were first Red Guards and then were sent to the countryside as "educated youth." In 1973 they returned to Beijing to continue their studies. In the 1980s they both left China for the United States for postgraduate education.

Although Ye's family enjoyed three generations of elite status, and Ma's (depending on how one interprets her description of her grandfather) only two, their life patterns were almost stereotypical of women of the elite urban class during this period. Both are ardent feminists who continually try to bring gender to bear in recounting their own and their families' experiences. Reading their transcribed conversations, however, one comes to see their distinct personalities; each woman tells a singular autobiographical tale. At times they experience similar events quite differently.

Through an introductory chapter and short notes that precede each oral conversation, Ye adeptly provides the historical background useful to those unfamiliar with China's history. She also provides a chronology of major political events from 1950 through 2000 and a glossary of "selected Chinese terms" used in the text. While in 2016 an expert in China's history would find little new or original in this work, when it was first published in 2005, readers certainly would have: Paul A. Cohen notes in his forward that Ye and Ma's book "raise[s] unsettling questions concerning the highly simplified and unrelievedly negative picture that we often get of the latter decades of the Mao era." (xi).

Cohen refers to the book as memoir, a term this reviewer considers more apt than oral history. Although most of the work consists of transcriptions of oral statements, it does not constitute oral history in the usual sense. The general tone is decidedly autobiographical throughout. Because the interviewer and interviewee are interchangeably the same person, there is none of the characteristic interplay and tension between them. Although the conversations are highly engrossing—indeed, fascinating—they are somewhat lacking in spontaneity. The transcriptions have been carefully edited, and most of the recorded statements bear the marks of a self-conscious, premeditated, and calculated narrative intended for a public audience.

Although a general reader would certainly find the book an exciting and satisfying read, the most riveting question that Ye raises in her introductory chapter about the Cultural Revolution is never truly answered: "How could a group of nice girls turn into murderers so quickly, when only a few months earlier everything still appeared normal in the school? How were members of my generation capable of behaving in such a ferocious manner? To a certain extent this oral history reflects our collective efforts to solve the puzzles about our generation" (3). Ye rejects explanations that...