Ultimate China Bookshelf #55: Jack Chen’s A Year in Upper Felicity

Life in a Chinese Village During the Cultural Revolution, published in 1973

Chen is uniquely qualified to write of life in Communist China. — Victor Wilson, El Paso Times

His narrative reveals how few of the joys of life Americans take for granted have been won by the Chinese farmers. Yet he makes a strong case for their betterment beginning with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. — Floyd Logan, The Indianapolis News

Filled with detailed observations on, and about, his (Chen’s) experiences in Chinese communal living. — The Daily Times (Maryland)

Because this is a book filled with real village people it is filled with real human interest. It is a book for those who really want to know what it is like to live in 1970s rural China. — Maslyn Williams, The Liverpool Echo

Author Bio:

Jack Chen (1908-1995), alternatively Chen I-Wan and Chen Yifan, was the son of the Chinese Trinidadian lawyer and Republican-era Chinese foreign minister Eugene Chan (Chen Youren) and his French-Creole wife Aisy. Chen was a noted artist and cartoonist who spent time living in China, the UK, and the U.S. Chen lived a somewhat peripatetic early life — educated in London, later at Vhkutemas (the Russian state art and technical school), in Moscow before moving to Wuhan to work as a journalist and cartoonist in the mid-1930s. He was a talented artist, exhibiting cartoons, prints, and drawings in Europe and the U.S. to raise support for China in the War of Resistance against Japan. He served in the British military for part of World War II. In 1949 he returned to China, serving as a consultant to Peking Review and other pro-communist party publications in the 1950s. In addition to A Year in Upper Felicity, Chen wrote several other books, including Folk Arts of New China, The Sinkiang (Xinjiang) Story, and The Chinese of America. He died in Berkeley, California in 1995.