Love and Famine

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Love and Famine

A true-fiction, historical novel by Han-ping Chin

A 9th-grader, Dapeng Liu, greets the 1949 communist victory in China with awe and confusion. While trying to shed old traditions and fit into the revolution, he’s constantly caught between incomprehensible reality and his conscience. Amid his struggles with shifting political dictates, academic and financial adversity, purges, a broken marriage, and loneliness, he learns to swim in the stormy sea of Mao’s first decades in power. As his professional achievement and ideological remolding win Party favor, he quietly maps a path to a brighter future and his lost love.  One of the readers dubbed it “The Chinese Dr. Zhivago.”

This coming of age story set in China from 1949-1965 during the Mao Zedong Era portrays a fate inextricably intertwined with the way Chinese people lived during the formative stage of modern China. Han-ping Chin’s historical autobiography fills the niche left by Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award, and other modern Chinese writers.

Praise for Love and Famine

“One should add ‘Politics’ to the two abstractions of the title, for Chin’s fictional world is infused with the cultural and personal consequences of Mao’s Great Leap Forward…. Because the author is an engineer who’s lived in the U.S. since 1978, the novel has a particularly autobiographical feel. Both epic and personal, this novel chronicles two decades of love, loss, history, and culture—and the complex tensions that arise from these forces—during the turbulent Mao era.”

—Kirkus

“Set during the turbulent years of Mao Zedong’s rise and into the Great Leap Forward, Love and Famine is a rich and detailed look at the lives of both Chinese intellectuals and peasants alike. Han-Ping Chin’s autobiographical novel offers a glimpse into the way the Chinese lived during the formative years of China’s communist regime…. Dapeng’s struggles and slow rise to triumph pull the reader along hoping for a semblance of a happy ending in the face of the near-insurmountable hardships surrounding him. A fascinating look at life during the Great Leap Forward, and a fine addition to the study and literature of the period.”

—Historical Novel Society

…carrying in the books

About the Author

Han-ping Chin was born in Wuhan and driven by Japanese troops to South China, where he spent his childhood in an abandoned coalmine district, a place of poverty, plagues, and superstition. He survived the war and the diseases it spread, while five of his siblings died. From 1956 to 1978, he worked as an engineer stabilizing tunnels and dams. Traveling through the provinces and living at various construction sites, he came know the people in all parts of China. In an era when propaganda replaced entertainment and friendships turned into political liabilities, he spent most of my spare time alone with the Chinese classics.

He came to the US as one of the first 52 PRC exchange scholars in 1978. Later, he received his PhD from the Mechanical Engineering Department at UC Berkeley, and registered as a civil engineer in California. Exposed to Western society and history that was heavily censored in China, he was forced to face the emotions, feelings, and memories of his earlier life that he’d thought long-since extinguished. An urge to offer a glimpse of an ancient, vanishing world to Western readers and younger generations of Chinese has lured him from his engineering profession. He’s been writing for the past thirty years, and his short stories have appeared in The Partisan Review and Willow Springs.