Snow Falling in Spring

Snow Falling in Spring by Moying Li is a coming-of-age memoir for young adults about growing up during China’s Cultural Revolution, circa 1966 to 1976. Published in 2008, the novel achieved Bank Street's 2009 Best Children's Book of the Year. The story starts close to Li’s home in Beijing, China, with a jarring suicide. In 1966, when Li was just 12-years-old, her school’s headmaster hung himself. This shocking and tragic event foretells other deaths to come as the Cultural Revolution rages on in China. This first person personal narrative conveys themes of separation and the value of education—even when the latter is forbidden by those in power. Other important themes in Snow Falling in Spring include loyalty vs. betrayal, obedience vs. chaos, and destruction.

Li provides a broad contextual background to situate readers and prepare them for the sweep of revolution. China manages to keep Japanese invaders at bay, only to be split by civil war. Out of the ashes of that conflict rise the People’s Republic of China. Li’s discussion of the world beyond her home helps to convey how global events affect her life. For example, she recalls melting family possessions down to contribute to the Great Leap Forward, an endeavor the Chinese government initiates in hopes of catching up to other industrialized nations. Despite public compliance, this endeavor fails. That and other failures lead to famine that affects China's citizens, including Li and her family.

Initially, Li is enrolled in a prestigious language school. She witnesses the Red Guards publicly beating and humiliating her teachers. Despite her attempts—and her family’s attempts—to see to Li’s education, her studies are constantly interrupted by larger political machinations. The Cultural Revolution is not a time of flourishing culture in China, but rather a period when the dictator Mao Zedong plunges the nation into cultural darkness by stamping out freedom of expression and oppressing intellectuals and educational pursuits. During this reign, some Chinese citizens, like Li's father, are sent to labor camps to be “reeducated” to purge them of any Western influence or inclination.



Li’s father, Baba, is a screenwriter, but he spends most of the Cultural Revolution imprisoned in labor camps. He is brought there after making a joke that could be read as criticizing the government. Minor offenses are enough to denounce neighbors and get them sent to labor camps. Separation as a theme is represented as much physically as it is emotionally. Li’s father is physically separated from her, but the emotional separation that comes from being denounced by classmates, neighbors, coworkers, or anyone else in one’s life is just as damaging, if not more for the element of betrayal.

With her mother gone, Li lives with and is essentially raised by her grandparents. After the government ransacks their home and takes Baba, Li must also face the denouncement of her kind-hearted grandmother, Lao Lao, who she considers to be her "surrogate mother" and hero. Accused of marrying a capitalist, Lao Lao is represented on posters as the state's enemy. Throughout the narrative, Li's grandmother is a pillar of strength and stability.

Despite having to live in such a tumultuous environment, Li’s teachers get her into a secret reading group and her father, also in secret, sends her a list of banned books and how to find them. This shows the value of education and how important it is specifically to Li’s father, her family, and to Li herself. Reading becomes for Li not only a method of escapism to new worlds unhindered by the difficulties of her own life, but also as a balm for the wounds of separation and a source of hope.



Li writes, "Gradually I realized that Baba's reading list was offering me more than just a joyful escape. It had given me a new sense of direction. And reading had taken on a meaning of its own. In a small way, I was regaining control of my life. My secret reading club, which never held an official meeting, helped to keep the flame of education alive inside me when the rest of my world was still besieged by darkness." At the end of the memoir, Li ultimately leaves China to come to the United States and pursue her education.

There aren’t many books about this period in China’s history given that so many books were banned and education and art were both suppressed. However, Snow Falling in Spring is often compared with the novel Red China Blues, a fictional account as told through the eyes of a Canadian student in China under Zedong’s totalitarian rule. Li provides a story from the point of view of someone born in China, an effective narrative choice that realistically details how the Chinese government operated to oppress its people. Another example of literature that takes place during Zedong’s rule is Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party by Ying Chang Compestine.

Li was among the first students to come from Beijing—and the greater China—to the United States on private scholarships since 1949. She attended Swarthmore College and earned her M.A., and then went on to Boston University, where she earned her M.B.A. and Ph.D. Her publishing career began when she was in college in China. Her first book, Beacon Hill—Life and Times of a Neighborhood, was published in 2003 and won the Julia Ward Howe Award.



In addition to writing, Li is an educator and equity analyst. Her professional career launched with the United Nations Development Programme in Beijing. She also works with several charities, including the Boston-Hangzhou Sister City Association, the Boston Author’s Club, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the American Club in Beijing, and the Pen American Club.