This book contains translations of two Chinese short stories on rural life during the Great Leap Forward of 1958–61. The first, A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang, depicts a forthright, quick-witted and beloved heroine who, by enthusiastically participating in the Leap, transformed herself from a subordinate, peasant housewife into the leader of her village's canteen and a Party member. As a model in Maoist literature always guides the way, Shuangshuang also helped others, including her conservative and wife-beating husband, make political progress. The second, The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, reveals a tragedy which occurred in the spring of 1960. After the collective canteen had run out of grain for seven days due to the state's excessive grain requisition, and all the people at Li Family stockade had caught oedema, Tongzhong, the village's party secretary, managed to borrow grain from his commune's granary by using his friendship with its director – a friendship made when they fought shoulder by shoulder in the Korean War. While the villagers were able to survive on the grain, Tongzhong was arrested because his illegal borrowing had reduced the state's stock. Tongzhong died of hunger in the county's hospital before he could be put on trial.

These two stories are an excellent choice in a number of ways. They provide readers with two contrasting heroes of the Great Leap. With Shuangshuang being a Maoist model woman who achieved gender liberation, matured in political consciousness and volunteered for the Great Leap programmes, Tongzhong proved to be an altruist, a people's hero sacrificed for saving others. He was not a Maoist hero, partly because he deliberately committed a “crime,” and also because he regarded grain in the commune's granary as belonging to the people, not the state. These stories also provide a sequential outline of Mao's Great Leap Forward from its utopian beginning to its disastrous end.

The story of Shuangshuang took place from the spring of 1958 to that of 1959, a period during which everything seemed rosy and everyone appeared to be cheerful as a communist society loomed in sight. By contrast, the story of Tongzhong, which occurred one year later, was full of crying, sorrow, fear and anger, as people were starving and full of desperation. Reading these two stories, one can easily see what caused this rapid transition from heaven to hell: exaggerations of agricultural production, excessive requisition of grain by the state, and abuses of power by local communist cadres. These books are also instrumental for understanding the Great Leap famine. Scholars have mostly studied the famine by examining national data and central government policies, but the two stories selected by Richard King, despite their fictional nature, are a vivid illustration of everyday reality at the village level, a reality that scholars have been unable to document.

There is no denying that Tongzhong provides a more realistic account of Mao's Great Leap Forward and its consequential famine. Both stories took place in Henan, one of the provinces that suffered the most at the time and is particularly infamous for the “Xinyang Incident” that resulted in the death of about one million people in 1959–60. Both writers are Henan natives, and were living there at that time. It is not too surprising that Zhang Yigong, who was criticized in 1959–60 for showing sympathy for “bourgeois humanity” in his short stories, published such a powerful story of Tongzhong in 1980 to reveal the shocking truth of the famine and the sublime character of a people's hero. However, given China's political conditions, Zhang still had to portray Tongzhong as a genuine Party member, thus reaffirming, perhaps tactically, that the Party was great. Li Zhun, the writer of Shuangshuang and well known for extolling China's socialism in writings, best exemplifies the Maoist philosophy that literature must serve the people – creating role models that inspire the people. In this manner Shuangshuang, a woman who loved the people's commune, was created by the writer's witty pen at the time when the peasants in Henan were enduring the hardships imposed by the commune system. It is ironic that Shuangshuang was published in China's top magazine People's Literature in March 1960, when Tongzhong and two million Henan peasants were dying.

Although both stories are well translated, the translations do not fully reflect the charm of some rural Henan colloquial expressions. A large portion of Shuangshuang took place in spring–summer 1958 when Shuangshuang's village was still a collective, but the translation has mistakenly termed her collective as “commune.” Despite small shortcomings in translation, the two stories in this book, with Richard King's introduction, are highly readable and important for understanding the Great Leap Forward.