Overview
In this heartfelt, intimate memoir, Yan Lianke brings the reader into his childhood home in Song County in Henan Province, painting a richly detailed portrait of rural China in the 1960s and ‘70s. In Me and My Father’s Generation Yan tells firsthand of the great privations that his family suffered during those years, both personal and political, with his quick wit and great gift for metaphor. It is a loving but hard childhood: Yan’s parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on New Year and special occasions, and as a child Yan dreams of fried scallion buns, and once even steals money from his father to buy a sesame seed cake. Novels become an escape, and Yan longs to become a writer after reading on the back of a novel that the writer was allowed to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her book. This possibility of escaping the village enthralls Yan, but earning money for his family, including through sixteen-hour shifts at a mine, and a later career in the Army, has to come first. The book moves from charming stories of Yan’s school days, to his parents’ great struggles in raising a daughter with disabilities, to his father’s torturous cultivation of a stone-filled plot of land on which he grows sweet potatoes only to have it be requisitioned by the government. Chronicling the extraordinary lives of his father and uncles, as well as his own, Me and My Father’s Generation is a portrait of the period unlike any other, and a heartfelt celebration of the power of the family to hold together in the harshest circumstances.
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