Fuyu Shen

"The Artisans: A Vanishing Chinese Village" by Shen Fuyu is a simple and easy book to read. There are fifteen chapters that act almost as stand-alone stories. Each chapter focuses on a different worker from Shen Village: a brick-layer, a pot-mender, a gardener, a teacher, and so forth.

Shen retells stories as they have been told to him. The stories mostly involve Shen's extended family. After all, the village is named for his ancestors. Many of them are hand-me-downs from nearly one hundred years ago. One or two of the stories are from the early years of Communist China and still other stories are quite recent. Although the past century has been a time of great turmoil for China as a whole, it was interesting to read that this small community was relatively untouched, save for the case of a man who was drafted into the Fourth Army and a man who became too big-headed when he became a local cadre.

I enjoyed the colloquialisms, nicknames, and language used in the book. Jeremy Tiang's translation made the book very smooth.… (más)