Essay: Rae Yang’s story, “Spider Eaters: A Memoir”

Rae Yang’s story, “Spider Eaters: A Memoir”, overlaps the periods of three diverse decades. She was from a revolutionary cadre’s family. Following spending her early life in Switzerland, she joined the Beijing 101 Middle School, which was a school for the elites. After the Cultural Revolution emerged, she vigorously joined in Red Guard activities in Beijing, as well as her peers in China. Yang later devoted five years working on a pig farm in a village situated in northern China, herding pigs and doing other physical labor. Although she grew up with faith in the Communist party and a love for Chairman Mao, her passion for revolution and devotion to the new China ceased after suffering from the hardships of physical labor. Yang’s story effortlessly demonstrates how the influences of the Cultural Revolution can change a person’s life.
Inside the Communist China after the revolution of 1949, power was consolidated in the state government. Maintaining control over everyday Chinese life, Chairman Mao pursued to inspire and introduce revolutionary ideals specifically among the youth. With the Cultural Revolution campaign beginning in 1966, youthful members like Rae Yang, sought out as a duty to protect the revolution from a backward transition into bourgeois capitalism by working as Red Guards. While introducing passionate revolutionary commitment, young revolutionaries operating as vanguards of the proletarian struggle wanted to ideologically cleanse the masses through varying strategies of violence. Violence was intended for all levels of society; Red Guards acted under the defense of Mao’s call to arms and an exceptional devotion to their progressing views of revolutionary ideals. Through Yang’s personal encounters, she advocates that the development of a culture based on premises of fear and paranoia would eventually change such justification into demanding the practice of violence as a strategy of sustaining Red Guard power and security.
Yang recalls on the ideological construction of her youth as being the foundation for her development into a successful Red Guard corps member. As the daughter of revolutionary cadres, Yang grew up in a household of Party structures and ideals. In addition to the recall of her parents’ revolutionary careers, she also writes of her familys’ living quarters and the practices taught within the jiguan, the revolutionary cadre yard compound (pg. 31). She expresses, “Everything in this big yard was a state secret” and that as she grew older, she came to “admire the unyielding revolutionary heroes and despise the traitors” (pg. 50). The order of the jiguan replicated the material manifestation of socialist order in China at the peak of Party power. The secrecy, hierarchy, and sense of ideological loyalty symbolized by the yards were attributes instilled in the youth who grew up within them. Revolutionary ideals and commitment was also instilled within the Beijing 101 Middle School. The students of the middle school were educated as the nation’s “most reliable, most courageous, and most brilliant youths” who would eventually take power at state leadership and control (pg. 92). This environmental influence placed on young Chinese, like Yang, early established their development into Red Guard ideological purists who would sincerely believe in the strict implementation of Party ideals, no matter the situation. The sense of ideological elitism at an early age prearranged the youth as perfect contenders to develop into Mao’s army of ideological purists and vanguards in 1966, expressing the little control Yang had over her direction in life; it was prearranged.
Yang growing up during the era of the Cultural Revolution played many of roles on the life she would later live. She was introduced to violence as a means of bargaining for a communist society. Her initiation into the Red Guards gave her the authority to implement the violence. Overall, she did not the live out her youth years the same way an American child in this century would, which makes this an eye-opening story on Chinese history.