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Spider Eaters: A Memoir. By RAE YANG. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. xi, 285 pp. $27.50.
Most of us are raised to believe that if we do something bad, the best way to deal with things is to tell the truth. Once we have confessed our transgressions, we will begin to feel better, and we may even be forgiven. This is true on a collective as well as an individual level. Underlying South Africa's "Truth Commission," the tribunals established to deal with the outrages in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the recent trials in France and Italy of alleged octogenarian war criminals we find not just a concern for justice, but also a belief that confession is good for the nation, that telling the truth is a way of cleansing the soul of the people and, in a sense, of mankind as a whole. Confronting the wrongs of the past is thus held to be a good thing, and the soul-searching it engenders contributes importantly to the creation of social memory in the twentieth century.
The enormous body of memoir literature that has emerged on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), to which Rae Yang's Spider Eaters is a noteworthy addition, fits squarely in this tradition of truth-telling and remembering. In English alone, close to twenty firsthand accounts of...