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Daughter of Good Fortune

A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Memoir

Chen Huiqin author Shehong Chen author Delia Davin editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Washington Press

Published:1st Apr '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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Daughter of Good Fortune cover

This is a smoothly written and richly detailed memoir that reflects the changes in peasant life in the Shanghai suburbs from the 1930s to the present. -- Gail Hershatter, author of The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past Daughter of Good Fortune illustrates the immense changes rural people have experienced since the founding of the PRC through today. It really is a worthy sequel to the classic account of peasant life in pre-communist China, Daughter of Han. -- Jeremy Brown, author of City Versus Countryside in Mao's China

Daughter of Good Fortune tells the story of Chen Huiqin and her family through the tumultuous 20th century in China. She witnessed the Japanese occupation during World War II, the Communist Revolution in 1949 and its ensuing Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Reform Era. Chen was born into a subsistence farming family, became a factory worker, and lived through her village’s relocation to make way for economic development. Her family’s story of urbanization is representative of hundreds of millions of rural Chinese.

"A faithful and meticulous transcription of her mother’s narrative. . . She has done a great service not only to Chen Huiqin, but also to readers who would like to understand the transformation of village life currently underway in China."

-- Richard King * Pacific Affairs *

"This book offers invaluable insights into the social history of rural China from a peasant perspective. Indeed, it reflects China’s history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and does so in a much more nuanced way than other Chinese memoirs available on the Western book market."

* Nan Nu: Men, Women, & Gender in China *

"Chen Huiqin’s memoir, Daughter of Good Fortune, provides a rare glimpse of life in rural China during the twentieth century."

* Twentieth-Century Chi

ISBN: 9780295994925

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 431g

336 pages