Lao Chen's The Fat Years

The Fat Years encompasses a story about mainland china and how suddenly the citizens are overtaken by amnesia. The book is also about the idea of how the citizens are fine with giving up their freedoms to the Chinese communist party, but they do this without having the adequate knowledge of what they are actually committing to. Throughout the book the reader can see how difficult it is for Lao Chen, the protagonist of the story, to come to terms with the idea that his life for the past two years has been a lie and that he has been deceived by the government. He has to learn how to deal his this new found knowledge and the consequences that it has on this morals and ethics. Throughout the book the question is brought up about history being …show more content…
The only true form that the government is able to control memory is by not allowing their to be certain types of books, this process makes sure that the younger generation will not have as much information about the historical events that have occurred. The system that they do have set up, where the water in China is tampered with allows there to be a memory control, because most of the citizens will experience a happy life instead of a negative one; which insinuates that that they will not be upset and thus only remember happy moments. Lao Chen’s group of friends had a couple of different questions; a main question was why did everyone seem to be happy all of a sudden? Once they did get there response from He Dongsheng, a higher ranking official that they kidnapped, they, mainly Little Xi , Fang Caodi, and Zhang Dou, began to get more upset with the system. They argued that the government was messing with people’s emotion and why/how could they do this. Once they asked that question, they began getting to the idea of morals and ethics that the book holds. He Dongsheng explained to the group that it was not the government’s job to deal with morals and ethics. During his speech he stated how China is doing very well, as best as it can looking at all of the circumstances; he emphasized that China is doing better than it ever has and it ever will because