Xun Zhou (3)

Excellent Study, Clunky Reading

I am having trouble giving this book a "star" ranking because I recognize that it is an extremely important piece of work, however it is also a very clunky read.

Xun Zhou set out to create an oral history of the horrendous famine that destroyed China in the late '50s and early '60s, the effects of which are still being felt today. In order to create this oral history, Zhou interviewed scores and scores of people all over the country who witnessed the famine. In "Forgotten Voices," she presents a small sample of those interviews. In her introduction, Zhou says that she will also work to create an online archive of all the interviews. Because this is the largest, worst famine in the history of humankind, Zhou's work as a historian and archivist is crucial. She is exposing the Communist Party's complicity in the famine, still a hush-hush subject in China.

Unfortunately, the book is a little hard to read. It is hard to read because the book does not present the interviews in full. The book chops up the interviews into small paragraphs and presents a few paragraphs at a time. In between these paragraphs of gut-wrenching testimony, Zhou provides a few details about the interviewees, describing where their county or village is located and what the profession of the interviewee was. The testimony is thus broken up. In addition, much of the testimony is very repetitive. There are, for example, multiple instances of people describing the same things, eating "immortal earth," having their cookware collectivized, and so forth. Because of the speed in which the paragraphs are presented, the reading goes very quickly and almost becomes anonymous.

Three other books, Jasper Becker's groundbreaking "Hungry Ghosts," Yang Jisheng's "Tombstone," and Frank Dikötter's "Mao's Great Famine," provide a much more comprehensive look at the famine that was caused by communist policy. Zhou's book almost feels like it is an addendum or an afterword to these books.

I would much prefer to read Zhou's interviews, including her questions, in full. I think she is doing a wonderful service to the study of history in collecting these memories. Her work needs to be lauded and I would appreciate reading it in full.… (lisätietoja)