My Bodhi Tree

Zhang Xianliang. My Bodhi Tree. Martha Avery, tr. London. Secker & Warburg. 1996. x + 227 pages. L 12. ISBN 0436-20323-5.

The increasing prosperity of China has tended to fade memories of history's most deadly man-made famine-the Chinese Three Years' Famine of 1960-62, in which literally tens of millions perished, mostly in the countryside. How could an ordinarily pragmatic nationality so dominant among the mercantile elite of both East Asia and Southeast Asia have veered onto such a selfdefeating course for so many years, starting in the late 1950s? Social scientists and historians have continued to discuss this problem, but in recent years most Chinese writers have turned away from it to focus on either the contemporary cultural scene or the precommunist period before 1949. Zhang Xianliang is one of the few major contemporary writers whose recent works suggest that a literary exploration of the recent cultural inheritance from the 1950s and 1960s is essential to a nuanced understanding of the contemporary Chinese cultural scene.

The background and onset of the Three Years' Famine from the standpoint of a former political prisoner...