Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang — Read

When I was a small boy, my grandmother told me about a distant uncle who was living in China during the Cultural Revolution. He promised to send a picture of himself to his relatives in America. If conditions were good, he said, he would be standing. If they were bad, he would be sitting. In the photo he sent us, my grandmother whispered, he was lying down! As a Chinese American born in Southern California, my perception of China's Cultural Revolution was limited to stories that <ered out from the few relatives who had stayed behind. As I grew older and China opened up to the West, I learned more. A friend who went to China to teach English returned with a raft of tales from survivors, each more horrible than the last.

The seeds of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been planted many years before it burst forth in 1966. Seventeen years earlier, in 1949, the charismatic revolutionary Mao Ze-dong led the Communist Party to power as the new leaders of China. Some, including my own grandparents with their children, feared the Communists and ned to the small owshore island of Taiwan. Many privileged Chinese chose to stay, however, motivated by a sincere belief that Mao Ze-dong would bring great changes to a nation weakened by centuries of corrupt government and foreign invasion.