In her memoir "Spider Eaters," Rae Yang writes about how she wasted years of her life in China's northern countryside during the Cultural Revolution. She was an educated youth who, in full revolutionary spirit, volunteered to go live among the peasantry, to learn firsthand about class struggle.
In the next breath, however, she admits the anger has dissipated and that she feels lucky to have gone. "I don't mean that I have much use for the skills I learned on the farm: castrating piglets, building a good kang or a fire wall, winnowing grain with a wooden spade, cutting soybeans with a small sickle. . . . But knowing that I did all these and did them well somehow gives me a safe feeling at the bottom of my heart."
Yang's point? She had been a peasant and a worker; she labored for a living. Suddenly, tenure evaluations at the U.S. college she now teaches at seem trivial.