The Rice Sprout Song.

About The Rice Sprout Song

The Rice Sprout Song is a 1955 novel by Eileen Chang. It was her first attempt at writing fiction in English and with it, she addresses political issues relevant to early 20th Century China in a far more direct approach than she was ever akin to. The novel depicts the extreme ruthless nature of the land redistribution movement of the Communist regime. The novel highlights the horrors and suffering it caused a southern agrarian village in early 1950s China and hinges on the lives of a large family of peasant landowners in the countryside. In doing so, the novel portrays several elements of a traditional Chinese family structure and the prominent culture of that era. The novel portrays the various and severe implications that the larger political institutions surrounding them impose, primarily the famine that led to the subsequent suffering of the peasants. It describes the desperation of ordinary farmers in the face of hunger in detail, and by analyzing the causes of hunger, highlights the contradiction between farmers' needs and government control, as well as the conflict between human nature and system. In the novel, there is also the cultural and organizational construction of the government in the countryside. Although it is also a means for the government to control the countryside, it obviously has no distinct theme of "hunger" because of its social progress.