i have lived a thousand years study guide pdf

Li’s second book and first novel, The Vagrants, specifically deals with the impacts of the Cultural Revolution: it tells the story of a devoted Communist’s renunciation of her beliefs and the impacts of her execution on her parents. Other stories in the book deal with similar themes, particularly parent-child relationships and the impacts of China’s twentieth-century political upheaval on the lives of ordinary people in both China and the United States. “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” is the titular story in Yiyun Li’s first book, a collection of stories called A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005). However, many people who left China struggled to reconcile the communist ideas they had learned during their upbringing with America’s capitalist values. Because of the continuous turmoil, repression, and poverty, many Chinese people immigrated, particularly to the United States, to seek new opportunities.

After Mao’s death, there was a contest of power, and subsequent leaders loosened some of the country’s strict communist policies and introduced some aspects of capitalist economics. From 1966 to Mao’s death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party led a social movement called the Cultural Revolution that attempted to eradicate all traces of capitalist culture and belief in Chinese society. The Great Leap Forward resulted in a destructive famine that killed millions of people. Most notably, the Great Leap Forward, a social and economic campaign conducted between 19, attempted to completely transform the country’s agricultural economy by outlawing private farming.

Newly named the People’s Republic of China and often known as “Red China,” the country saw significant upheaval under communist leadership, particularly Chairman Mao Zedong. After a long civil war, China became a communist country in 1949 and allied itself with the Soviet Union. Much of Yiyun Li’s writing addresses the impacts of the political revolution and turmoil in China during the twentieth century.

I have lived a thousand years study guide pdf