Moying Li,
Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China during the Cultural Revolution
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Ages YA to adult

During China’s Cultural Revolution, the emotional center of Moying Li’s long-loyal Communist family was her grandmother, Lao Lao, to whom her beautifully written memoir is dedicated. Li’s mother taught and lived at a school too far to commute from home. Her father, despite a relatively safe position as a screenwriter for military films, eventually spent several years in a labor re-education camp. For Li, age 4 in 1958 when her story begins, and her younger brother, the family’s Beijing home and courtyard provided ballast throughout the repeated upheavals of their childhood and adolescence. By the early 1970’s, however, even this resilient family, Li says, had lost its soul.

Li marks the end of her childhood at age 12, when a beloved teacher at her boarding school for the past 3 years hung himself after fierce criticism. She was to see more friends and teachers die from deprivation, betrayal and political maneuvering over the coming years. But she also saw her grandmother shelter less fortunate friends, and many others offered brave examples of integrity as Li struggled to forge a moral compass in a shifting political and economic landscape—from disastrous famines through teenage militant anarchy to Gang of Four treachery. She took to heart her father’s quiet caution not to believe everything she heard. Her own education, repeatedly disrupted and derailed, was managed through danger-fraught smuggling of western and Chinese books, the kind mentoring of a retired professor, and the respite of public parks during long periods away from home.

In 1980, Li entered Swarthmore College, one of the first private scholarship students to leave China since 1949. She earned an MBA and Ph.D. from Boston University and has had a successful U.S. career as an investment banker and China expert.

Snow Falling in Spring is a clear, compelling and intimate read that offers a sensitive personal perspective on a complex society growing into modernity. An introduction, chronology and glossary provide background and a historical timeline. Black and white photographs add further interest.

Li’s first book, Beacon Hill, a study of the venerable Boston community, won the prestigious Julia Ward Howe Award from the Boston Authors Club in 2003. Snow Falling in Spring, a warm evocation of her own long-lost Beijing community and childhood, is a worthy followup.

Charlotte Richardson
May 2008