A Year in Upper Felicity

A Year In Upper Felicity: Life in a Chinese Village During the Cultural Revolution is a book written and illustrated by journalist and author Jack Chen. Published in May 1973, the book chronicles a year spent in a rural Chinese village (Upper Felicity) during the Cultural Revolution. It was based upon the author's stay in the village during 1969-1970. A Year in Upper Felicity is not a work of fiction as the original entry erroneously stated.

The book is organized around the four seasons. It describes the day-to-day life of rural Chinese peasants, and how city dwellers (such as the author) were sent to live and work with peasants to further the supposed imminent socialist revolution that dominated Chinese politics in the 1960s.

Jack Chen has written a number of other books about life in China, including:

  • Chen, Jack (1957). New earth. Southern Illinois University Press. – "Until now, very little firsthand informa­tion about Communist China has been available in this country. Of extraordinary importance, therefore, is this story of an early collective farm in East China’s Chekiang Province in the 1949–56 period."
  • Chen, Jack (1975). Inside the cultural revolution. Macmillan. – "Here he gives a favorable recapitulation of the Cultural Revolution, written in a mixture of dry academese and Maoist jargon."
  • Chen, Jack (1990). The Chinese of America. Harper & Row. – "Examines the events that led to the Tian'anmen Square massacre, discusses religious freedom in China, and speculates on whether a Chinese democracy could survive."

Famous quotes containing the words year, upper and/or felicity:

    At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

    But that beginning was wiped out in fear
    The day I swung suspended with the grapes,
    And was come after like Eurydice
    And brought down safely from the upper regions;
    And the life I live now’s an extra life
    I can waste as I please on whom I please.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life it self is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Faeroe, no more than without Sense.
    Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)