The Old Master who collected Chinese wisdom in Tao Te Ching some 2,500 years ago wrote pithily:
"The sage never has a mind of his own;
He considers the minds of the common people to be his mind."

Today, he would not change a word for the sage: the sheng-jen in Beijing. True, modern China, a colossus of 1.2 billion people, is fronted by Shanghai and other booming, skyscrapered, fiber-opticked, globally connected metropolises. But beyond the urban fronts, reality is 900 million peasants--75% of the total population--living a rural, feudal life with Marxist trappings. What gives the Beijing mandarin insomnia is not rhetorical exchanges with America like we saw earlier in 2001. No, it's much more the primal fear bad weather and bad crops might visit hunger upon the 900 million--if the peasants go hungry, the government goes down and chaos surely follows. Chaos, for the Chinese mind, being anathema (off the Tao, hindering wu-wei).

The Rice-Sprout Song by Eileen Chang (1920-95), first published in 1955, deftly evokes rural Chinese life in the early days of the Maoist Revolution. Though well known to Chinese readers everywhere, Chang's work has only recently been in print again for English readers. In 1998, three years after her death, the University of California reissued this novel and a companion work, The Rouge of the North.

Chang, a giant in Chinese literature, wrote and lived a self-proclaimed aesthetic of desolation, especially after immigrating to the United States in the mid-Fifties. A Garbo-esque recluse, Chang was found dead in a barren Hollywood, California, studio apartment. Her will asked that her body be "cremated instantly, the ashes scattered in any desolate spot, over a fairly wide area, if on land." If Chang, as she said, was haunted by thoughts of desolation, then The Rice-Sprout Song shows a corollary to her artistic hunger: Her writing transcends any simple, obvious political interpretation of her material. Neither pro-Mao nor anti-Mao, but a literary meditation on peasant lives caught up in the ironies of political will and human need when hunger stalks the countryside.

The Rice-Sprout Song gets underway with a common family event: a wedding. Gold Flower of T'an Village will marry Plenty Own Chou of neighboring Chou Village. This might not be a joyous occasion for Chang begins to summon the isolation and loneliness of village life: "Sunlight lay across the street like an old yellow dog, barring the way. The sun had grown old here." Yes, even that universal restorer of the spirit--the sun--can be menacing. That all is not right when the festive wedding occasion arrives is shown by note of the "inferior food" that of necessity is served. Big Uncle complains that he cannot see the rice in his bowl of watery gruel. This jho mush--anything but solid rice--becomes one thematic particular for hunger that haunts this novel.

If Chang were less an artist, the reader's easy-to-hate nemesis would be Comrade Wong, the kan pu of T'an Village, the local representative of the Party. For it is Comrade Wong's unenviable task to carry out a political action showing support for the People's Liberation Army in their fight on the Korean front: a gift the peasants cannot afford: half a pig and forty catties of rice cakes from each family. But before this leads to the tragic end to The Rice-Sprout Song, we follow, in flashback, Wong as he finds the love of his life, Shah Ming. He loses her in the vagaries of fighting for the PLA. When at last he sees her again, she waves from a window in the facade of a collapsed building on the battlefield. Inside the building, Wong sees only rubble and overhead, at the window, nothing. He knows his hallucination proved Shah Ming was saying good-bye from beyond. For Comrade Wong, fate gave him nothing but the Party.

We also see dramatic irony when Comrade Ku, the city intellectual, comes to live in T'an Village, to learn the ways of the peasants. His goal of a movie script about village life suffers from writer's block; he habitually sneaks off to another town to buy food to eat on the sly. And when Big Aunt, who spouts Communist rhetoric that is appallingly upbeat, breaks down in a fit of anger. She says they are all empty-bellied and she doesn't care if she is reported. And when Moon Scent, the wife of Gold Root, returns from working three years as a maid in Shanghai. A force to be reckoned with, Moon Scent, in an act of righteous anger, gives this tragedy its capstone.

Essential reading that shares the texture, the heritage, and the yearnings of nearly a billion of our fellow earthlings, search out this reissue of The Rice-Sprout Song. As one t'ai chi ch'uan teacher said, "Perfect doesn't exist. Near-perfect does." The Rice-Sprout Song is a "near-perfect" evocation of the common people in the timeless Middle Kingdom.

I am like The Rice Sprout Song.Eileen chang is the greatest writer of China.

Rice Sprout Song is possibly the best work of literature I have ever read. It was first recommended to me as descriptive of the collectivization era shortly after the 1949 Revolution in China, a classic tale between the state and the individual. It is a spellbinding, troubling work, and is almost impossible to believe that it was Eileen Chang's first work in English. The language she uses is sparse, beautiful and conveys greatest impact after the last page is read, and the cover closed. It is more than an interesting story about conflict between the state and the individual. It is an unsettling story of physical starvation and the death of hope and love.

Eileen Chang has created a vivid and poignant portrait of a young who is trapped in a traditional, patriachal system. Yindi, a lower-class girl, is forced into an unhappy marriage. Her husband is ineffectual and somewhat infantile. Blind and addicted to opium, he can not defend Yindi and himself. Yindi's mother-in-law, Old Mistress, is also a victim of the system herself. She turns her power onto everyone in the house. In reality, after her death, none of her sons gets a dime. In the end, Yindi mistakens her madness as her power. Her insanity escalates as China goes through drastic changes. Chang's prose is captivating; it keeps spinning the fascinating, complex of Yindi. The descriptions are vividly drawn. Chang wrote this novel in English (no translation).

In Ding Ling's "Miss Sophia's Diary," in the entry of March 28, the main character, Sophia, makes an honest assessment of her life as a woman: "....why I've felt such bitter despair for so long. Only I know how many tears I've shed....Rather than calling this diary a record of my life, it's more accurate to regard it as the sum of all my tears." In a way, Eileen(Ai-Ling)Chang's Rouge of the North is the sum of Yindi's tears. From a lower class, Yindi is fated to be doomed in a patriarchal system. As a woman, she does not have much choice in deciding whom she's going to marry. Her only shred of freedom is shown when she fantasizes about marrying Young Liu. However, she knows, for more practical reasons, that marrying Young Liu is out of the question. He is poor and unassertive. Her brother and sister-in-law quickly arrange her marriage with a richer family. Little does she know, her new husband is blind and somewhat an invalid, who lies in bed and gets high on opium. The second part, a big bulk of it, devotes to Yindi's life at the Yao's residence. At her new husband's residence, Yindi has to deal with her controlling mother-in-law, Big Mistress, who, after the death of her husband, practically takes over the household. Furthermore, Yindi is more like a babysitter to her husband than she is a wife to him. He refuses to talk about their future or where they're standing as far as family inheritance is concerned. Along with a demanding mother-in-law, Yindi also has to face the other sisters-in-law. They ridicule her of her child-like husband and her sex life. However, later on, Yindi finds out that Third Mistress (or third sister-in-law) is as unhappy as she is. Third Mistress eventually laments to Yindi that Third Master is never home. He is always at a "singsong" house or an opium den. He usually comes home in the wee hour of the night. On top of that, Third Mistress has to concoct all sorts of stories to save him from his mother, Old Mistress. Through out this part of the novel, we also learn that Third Master and Yindi have sexual attraction for each other. Whether or not they carry that relationship further, I am not quite sure. That part of the relationship is rather ambiguous. However, readers can definitely feel the sexual tension or attraction between them. In any cases, it seems that Yindi revels in that kind of tension. She needs attention. Another interesting element in the novel is how Chang creates that competitive sense among these women. They all want to protect each other; unfortunately, they also feel to have the need to stab each other's back. It is like a vicious cycle. In the final part, Yindi gives birth to a boy,Yensheng, which itself is a blessing and a celebration. The birth of a girl would probably not only diminish Yindi's status but also devastate her. Yengsheng also becomes an opium addict. As a child, he has chronic asthma. They breath opium into him to relieve his asthmatic symptoms. Also at this point of the novel, as China is going through drastic changes, so does the Yao family. Old Mistress dies. China is at war with the Japanese. The family wealths are divided among the men, of course. Most of these men are senior members of the family. With the possibility that Yensheng may be inherited the future estate, Yindi's power is spinning out of control. The family is falling apart. Third Master is getting old and being pounded by debt collectors. I think Third Mistress kills herself (I am not sure). Consequently, in the end, we see Yindi gradually becoming powerful, in a mad sense. Eileen (Ai-Ling) Chang has created a brilliant portrait of a young girl going mad because of the patriarchal, recyclic system, in which women are regarded as merely a reproductive opportunity. Whether one sees Yindi as a coward or a victim, one thing is certainly true, she does not have a choice. Like Flaubert's Madame Bovary or any of Austen's female characters, regardless of their status and intelligence, marriage and death are the only two options. The viable option is obvious. After reading The Rouge of the North, one either senses the triumphant of Yindi's perseverance or sees her as a mad concubine who chooses to compromise her dignity for power. Whatever view the readers adopt, one thing is certain, Eileen Chang has written a poignant masterpiece of an incredible woman who perseveres through the confinement by her society.

** Also read Su Tong's Raise the Red Lanterns (also a film by Zhang Yimou) and anything works by Ding Ling **

This book is good,too.I am like it.