"From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast
world. . . ."
So begins Zhang Daye's preface to "The World of a Tiny Insect,"
his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when China's
devastating Taiping rebellion began, Zhang was seven years old. The
Taiping rebel army occupied Shaoxing, his hometown, and for the
next two years, he hid from Taiping soldiers, local bandits, and
imperial troops and witnessed gruesome scenes of violence and
death. He lost friends and family and nearly died himself from
starvation, illness, and encounters with soldiers on rampages.
Written thirty years later, "The World of a Tiny Insect" gives
voice to this history. A rare premodern Chinese literary work
depicting a child's perspective, Zhang's sophisticated text
captures the macabre images, paranoia, and emotional excess that
defined his wartime experience and echoed throughout his adult
life. The structure, content, and imagery of "The World of a Tiny
Insect" reveals a carefully crafted, fragmented narrative that
skips in time and probes the relationships between trauma and
memory, revealing both history and its psychic impact. Xiaofei
Tian's annotated translation includes an introduction that situates
"The World of a Tiny Insect" in Chinese history and literature and
explores the relevance of the book to the workings of traumatic
memory.
Zhang Daye (b. 1854) is known only as the author of "The World
of a Tiny Insect." Xiaofei Tian is professor of Chinese literature
at Harvard University. Among her recent publications is "Visionary
Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and
Nineteenth-Century China."
"The author and narrator recounts his terrible experiences and
miraculous survivals with a child's curiosity and in a vivid,
straightforward way. But he also embeds what happened to him in a
larger historical, philosophical, moral, and aesthetic context. No
comparable primary source available in English does anything like
this for the Taiping Rebellion." --Judith Zeitlin, University of
Chicago
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