The Woman from Shanghai

One of China’s most celebrated and controversial writers gives us a work of fact-based fiction that reveals first-hand—and for the first time in English—what life was like in one of Mao’s most notorious forced labor camps. Between 1957 and 1960, three thousand Chinese citizens were labeled “rightists” by the Communist Party and banished to Jiabiangou in China’s northwestern desert region of Gansu to undergo “reeducation” through...
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One of China’s most celebrated and controversial writers gives us a work of fact-based fiction that reveals first-hand—and for the first time in English—what life was like in one of Mao’s most notorious forced labor camps. Between 1957 and 1960, three thousand Chinese citizens were labeled “rightists” by the Communist Party and banished to Jiabiangou in China’s northwestern desert region of Gansu to undergo “reeducation” through hard labor. These exiled men and women were subjected to horrific conditions, and by 1961 the camp was closed because of the stench of death: of the three thousand inmates, only six hundred survived. In 1997, Xianhui Yang traveled to Gansu and spent the next three years interviewing more than one hundred survivors of the camp. InWoman from Shanghaihe presents twelve of their stories, which have been crafted into fiction in order to evade Chinese censorship but which lose none of their fierce power. These are tales of ordinary people facing extraordinary tribulations, time and again securing their humanity against those who were intent on taking it away. Xianhui Yang gives us a remarkable synthesis of journalism and fiction—a timely, important, and uncommonly moving book. From the Hardcover edition.