Love and Famine
Han-ping Chin
9781941861455
544 pages
Harvard Square Editions
Overview
A 9th-grader, Dapeng Liu, greets the 1949 communist victory in China with awe and confusion. While trying to shed
old traditions and fit into the revolution, he's constantly caught
between incomprehensible reality and his conscience. Amid his struggles
with shifting political dictates, academic and financial adversity,
purges, a broken marriage, and loneliness, he learns to swim in the
stormy sea of Mao's first decades in power. As his professional
achievement and ideological remolding win Party favor, he quietly maps a
path to a brighter future and his lost love. One of the readers dubbed
it “The Chinese Dr. Zhivago.”
This coming of age story set in China from 1949-1965 during the Mao
Zedong Era portrays a fate inextricably intertwined with the way Chinese
people lived during the formative stage of modern China. Han-ping
Chin's historical autobiography fills the niche left by Ha Jin, winner
of the National Book Award, and other modern Chinese writers.
Author Bio
Han-ping Chin was born in Wuhan and driven by Japanese troops to South China, where he spent his childhood
in an abandoned coalmine district, a place of poverty, plagues, and
superstition. He survived the war and the diseases it spread, while five
of his siblings died. From 1956 to 1978, he worked as an engineer
stabilizing tunnels and dams. Traveling through the provinces and living
at various construction sites, he came know the people in all parts of
China. In an era when propaganda replaced entertainment and friendships
turned into political liabilities, he spent most of my spare time alone
with the Chinese classics. He came to the US as one of the first 52 PRC exchange scholars in 1978. Later, he received his PhD from the Mechanical Engineering
Department at UC Berkeley, and registered as a civil engineer in
California. Exposed to Western society and history that was heavily
censored in China, he was forced to face the emotions, feelings, and
memories of his earlier life that he’d thought long-since extinguished.
An urge to offer a glimpse of an ancient, vanishing world to Western
readers and younger generations of Chinese has lured him from his
engineering profession. He’s been writing for the past thirty years, and
his short stories have appeared in The Partisan Review and Willow Springs.
