The Rice-Sprout Song by Eileen Chang
Published 1955 · 60,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Political Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is The Rice-Sprout Song to read?
The Rice-Sprout Song scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Precise rural and administrative vocabulary of grain quotas, work points and cadre titles, in Chang's characteristically exact prose.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Controlled sentences with Chang's habitual metaphors, plainer here than in her Shanghai fiction but still deliberately shaped.
- Abstraction: 46 out of 100
- Everything is measured in rice, pork and cash; the political argument stays inside the household accounts.
- Information density: 56 out of 100
- The mechanics of requisition, work points and rationing are laid out precisely and matter to every scene.
- Narrative indirection: 64 out of 100
- Characters say the opposite of what they know throughout, and the narration reports the official version alongside the empty bowl without connecting them.
- Symbolic density: 66 out of 100
- The yangge dance of the title — a peasant celebration performed by starving people for a propaganda film — is the book's controlling image.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- Every public statement in the novel is contradicted by the food in front of the person making it, and Chang never once points this out.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The granary riot is put down, a death is written up as an accident, and the official record closes over what the reader has seen.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- A linear narrative over a few months in one village, with a late shift to the film-maker's viewpoint.
How The Rice-Sprout Song is regarded
The Rice-Sprout Song holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.