Educated Youth Summary

Another “educated youth,” Han Shao gong from Hunan, explored the daily lives of the lower orders of society in an unconventional style of literature. Another “educated youth,” Han Shaogong from Hunan, explored the daily lives of the lower orders of society in an unconventional style of literature. It is one that reflects the traditions of folk culture, as represented in his root-denying Homecoming and root-searching Dad Dad Dad and Woman Woman Woman. In these works, Han tries, as he himself puts it, to “solve some of the riddles that determine ethnic development and human subsistence,” while “releasing the hot energy of modern concepts and recasting and re-illuminating the ethnic ego.” After graduating from middle school, Han went to Baxidong, a remote minority ethnic area in Hunan, and

But sacrificing youth to hard labor in the countryside, factories, mines and frontiers was nonetheless a bitter pill to swallow. Life in the lower echelons of Chinese society encouraged young writers to identify with the emotions and direct language of those they encountered. These writers emulated the lack of fear they observed in the people that dared to love and hate openly, and to speak and write their minds.

An outstanding group in this generation is that of “Obscure Poetry.” Literary critics regard them as representing the rise of “New Aesthetics.” Shu Ting is one of its representatives. She was in her second year of middle school when the “cultural revolution” started. She was soon obliged to leave campus for the countryside, where she spent three years. During the next eight years she worked in a bulb factory. Living through a period that threatened to “wipe out everything” actually consolidated her self-esteem and humanistic spirit. In To the Oak Tree, she speaks as a ceiba standing next to an oak tree:

“Side by side we endure chills, storms and