The Red Mirror: Children of China's Cultural Revolution

By Bruce Jones and Chihua Wen

Book Overview

These evocative stories bring to life the tragic personal impact of the Cultural Revolution on the families of China's intellectuals. Now adults, survivors recall their childhood during the tumultuous years between 1965 and 1976, when Mao's death finally drew a curtain on a bitterly failed social and political experiment.A series of first-person narratives eloquently describes the life-long influence of this seminal period on China's children. Those who were teenagers in the late 1960s joined the Red Guards and the revolutionary rebel groups, following Mao's directives to make revolution, often to their own undoing. Those who were too young to participate directly were even more vulnerable. Although they had little understanding of the political firestorm that engulfed their parents, they were old enough to understand and feel the terror it brought. Vividly capturing the emotional intensity of the time, these stories explore what it was like to be caught up in revolutionary fervor, to be sent to the countryside, to be separated?either ideologically or physically?from one's parents, often forever.By undermining families and family structure, the Cultural Revolution created a generation of Chinese who view politics, the Communist Party, and life itself with deep cynicism. Presenting a spectrum of individual stories of people who saw the Cultural Revolution through the eyes of a child, The Red Mirror offers rare insights for understanding the crippling legacy of the Cultural Revolution.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813324882
• ISBN13: 9780813324883
• Release Date: December 1994
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Gripping memoirs of the Cultural Revolution

In this compilation of stories, readers will learn about the horrors that many children in China had to live through. All of the stories are told by Chinese who were children or adolescents during the peak of the Cultural Revolution. Many were torn from their parents, some never forgot or forgave the pain that Chairman Mao's reforms put them through. This book is an intensely emotional window into China. Though some stories are disturbing, it is an important book to read if you want to know where the Chinese people are coming from. The experiences they had in the 60's and 70's have shaped who they are today, both individually and as a nation.

well written and poetic

This is a collection of interviews with people who were children during the Cultural Revolution. The author writes in English and translates the narratives herself, which gives the book a poetic unity, made even more enjoyable by the fact that she writes well. Unlike Feng Jicai's Ten Years of Madness, Chihua Wen's own writing is evocative, complementary, unintrusive, and poetic. The narratives aren't as diverse as Feng's, but the writing here is better.