Review by Mitch Hall

Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution

By Chun Yu

(New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: A Paula Wiseman Book,

Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2005)

Chun Yu’s memoir in free verse of the first ten years of her life is an enchanting, award-winning literary delight. It is written with such grace and lucidity that the publisher chose to market it as juvenile literature, although the author wrote it with no age limit in mind. It narrates a compelling and accessible story that can engage and educate young readers. At the same time, it offers to adults a deep, subtle, and aesthetically pleasurable evocation of the author’s childhood experiences, joys, wonder, and worries in the midst of the intense and confusing political turmoil that marked the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In a few more than 100 pages, Chun Yu conjures up the whole, rich microcosm that was her childhood world. By simply telling her individual story in such sensitively rendered vignettes, with just the right measure of detail, she reaches beyond herself to illuminate formative experiences for her generation in China, as well as universal themes of human existence.

Through this book, we meet Chun Yu’s family, four generations deep from her great-grandparents to herself and her two siblings, as they endure and adapt to the challenges, hardships, and absurdities presented by the Cultural Revolution. We discover their remarkable courage and the loving support they give one another. We learn how Chun Yu interpreted baffling events with her bright, creative child’s mind. We visualize the scenes of nature through the changing seasons at which she marveled as a child and that she narrates so vividly as an adult. We hear the children’s chants, her grandma’s songs, and the political slogans of the day. We laugh over incidents of childhood mischief, and we are touched by the death of a beloved family member and her childhood awakening to the reality and mysteries of mortality. We gain glimpses of collective, historical tragedies before her time, such as the Japanese invasion and massacres that happened during her mother’s childhood. We learn about Chinese customs and culture. There is more, so much more, in this book. I kept being surprised. The first time I read it, I did so in one evening, losing all sense of time. For the second reading, I savored it more slowly over days. With the third reading, I still discovered more.

An amazing feature of Little Green is that Chun Yu wrote it directly and masterfully in English, which is a second language for her. She grew up entirely in China and completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Peking University. She came to the U. S. for further graduate studies, which led to a doctorate from Rutgers in biotechnology and to postdoctoral research jointly sponsored by Harvard and M. I. T. While working full-time as a scientist, she began writing poetry, which she read at open microphone sessions in the Cambridge/Boston area, where she gained respect and renown as a gifted “local poet.” She decided to take a course in writing short fiction. It was at this time that the project of writing Little Green came to her. She told her teacher that what she wanted to write for the course was not fiction, not short, and not prose. The teacher had the wisdom and graciousness to let Chun Yu follow her creative inspiration. After working all day, she would sit down quietly at home and wait for a story to come. Evening after evening, as if coming across the ocean, time, and space, a story would emerge in her mind. Chun said that writing the stories in English gave her a sense of liberation. Alone at her desk, she would laugh and cry as she wrote, and sometimes a verse would come as if being revealed in its perfect form. Chun Yu has such a fine ear for free verse in English, her lines comparable in eloquent simplicity to the masterful poetic sensibility of, for example, William Carlos Williams.

Little Green is a beautifully designed book. Chun Yu’s parents were visiting the United States at the time the book was being prepared for publication, and her father created the calligraphy and the seal that have been incorporated elegantly into the design. Chun Yu recognizes that although her father was a greatly gifted artist, he never had the freedom to fully pursue his dreams because of the hardships he endured. In her own creative pursuits, she is vindicating her dad’s unfulfilled potential. She feels very close to her family, calling her parents in China almost every day. She also remains warmly connected to her brother and sister. Chun Yu’s stories give evidence of secure attachment from the very start of her life, despite the political chaos of the time. Her narrative style is indicative of secure attachment. A securely attached adult answers questions about early significant relationships in the following way. The quality of the narrative is truthful and supported by evidence. The quantity of the narrative is concise yet thorough. The relation of the narrative to the interviewer’s questions (in this case, the relation of the book to the readers’ interest) is contingent and collaborative. Finally, the manner of the narrative is clear and orderly. The lyrical, artistically refined, narrative style of Little Green meets all of these criteria in exemplary fashion.  As the stories reveal consistently, Chun Yu and her brother and sister were loved, protected, cherished, and treated in their family with kindness and understanding, even in the most socially and politically difficult times of their lives. It is ironic that because Little Green is written in English Chun Yu’s parents cannot read it. She said that she has told them about what she wrote and that perhaps she ought to tape record the stories in Chinese just for their pleasure.

I hope that readers of this review who have not yet read Little Green will be inspired to discover for themselves its many, inexhaustible treasures. There is one more piece of good news to share. Little Green is the first volume of an autobiographical trilogy, and the third book in the series will narrate Chun Yu’s direct experience of the student-led, pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. The subsequent volumes of the trilogy are already drafted. I heartily encourage you to tune in and to stay tuned to her writing. Chun Yu is a greatly gifted writer who has witnessed life with deep insight and who has valuable, moving stories to tell. You can also get more information about Little Green and the author from her elegantly designed Web site, www.chunyu.org.