Why read The Rice Sprout Song?

Book cover of The Rice Sprout Song

Book description

The first of Eileen Chang's novels to be written in English, The Rice-Sprout Song portrays the horror and absurdity that the land-reform movement brings to a southern village in China during the early 1950s. Contrary to the hopes of the peasants in this story, the redistribution of land does not…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Rice Sprout Song as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Alice Poon

Author

This is a heart-wrenching novel about hunger and starvation in the early 1950s in a Southern China village. The book title implies the joy of harvest, which has a rhetorical effect as it runs counter to the book theme. Its metaphor for hunger is watery gruel that the rural poor eat for every meal as they slowly starve. The story is about the impending great famine after the Communist Party introduces the land reform policies and how villagers suffer in silence atrocious government abuse.

This novel is a must-read if you want to understand what starvation feels like.

From Alice's list on novels that take place in China.