Liang Hong - Böcker

Wu Township is hollowing out. Our most capable sons and daughters have long since uprooted from their birthplace on the central plains to fuel China’s economic miracle. The ancient trees now sit in the shade of a modern aqueduct, funnelling even our precious water to the metropolises beyond.From the marketplace where gossip is traded to the long-abandoned execution grounds, ordinary life carries on. For we who remain, feuds between neighbours compound the burdens shared by increasingly ageing shoulders. But If you know where to look, you’ll find the town still clings to its customs and dreams.Let me show you around. If we’re lucky, we’ll run into the benevolent doctor or beauty store owner, and if we’re not, the corrupt local official, perhaps even the souls of executed ancestors. Why do you want to visit? To see it before it’s all gone… of course.

Wu Township is hollowing out. Our most capable sons and daughters have long since uprooted from their birthplace on the central plains to fuel China’s economic miracle. The ancient trees now sit in the shade of a modern aqueduct, funnelling even our precious water to the metropolises beyond.From the marketplace where gossip is traded to the long-abandoned execution grounds, ordinary life carries on. For we who remain, feuds between neighbours compound the burdens shared by increasingly ageing shoulders. But If you know where to look, you’ll find the town still clings to its customs and dreams.Let me show you around. If we’re lucky, we’ll run into the benevolent doctor or beauty store owner, and if we’re not, the corrupt local official, perhaps even the souls of executed ancestors. Why do you want to visit? To see it before it’s all gone… of course.

After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Hebei province. What she found was an extended family torn apart by the seismic changes in Chinese society, and a village hollowed-out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang's by turns moving and shocking account became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame. Across China, many saw in Liang's remarkable and vivid interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own families, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed observer, one family, and one village.