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Son of the Revolution, by Liang Heng, Judith Shapiro
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An autobiography of a young Chinese man whose childhood and adolescence were spent in Mao's China during the Cultural Revolution.
- Sales Rank: #80470 in Books
- Brand: Heng, Liang/ Shapiro, Judith/ Liang, Heng
- Published on: 1984-02-12
- Released on: 1984-02-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .71" w x 5.22" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review
"An Oriental Tom Jones." -- Newsweek
Liang Heng was born in 1954 in Changsha, a large city in Central China. His parents were intellectuals -- his father a reporter on a major provincial newspaper, his mother a ranking cadre in the local police. This is Liang Heng's own story of growing up in the turmoil of the Great Cultural Revolution. His story is unique, but at the same time it is in many ways typical of those millions of young Chinese who have been tested almost beyond endurance in recent years. In his words we hear an entire generation speaking.
"A poignant inside look at what happened to ordinary citizens when the movement that ousted Chiang Kaishek's totalitarianism turned against itself. Liang helps Americans understand the past that China's leaders must overcome to cope with the future."
-- The Chicago Sun-Times
"Three stories in one -- first, a graphic, I-was-there account of what it was like to grow up during the Cultural Revolution; second, a cliffhanger love story with a happy ending; and third, a poignant analysis of how Chinese people have tried and failed, and tried again, to break out of their past. Each of these accounts is worth reading on its own." -- The New York Review of Books
"A significant event in our understanding of China...compelling, detailed, and devastating."
-- The New Republic
From the Inside Flap
An autobiography of a young Chinese man whose childhood and adolescence were spent in Mao's China during the Cultural Revolution.
From the Back Cover
"An Oriental Tom Jones." -- Newsweek
Liang Heng was born in 1954 in Changsha, a large city in Central China. His parents were intellectuals -- his father a reporter on a major provincial newspaper, his mother a ranking cadre in the local police. This is Liang Heng's own story of growing up in the turmoil of the Great Cultural Revolution. His story is unique, but at the same time it is in many ways typical of those millions of young Chinese who have been tested almost beyond endurance in recent years. In his words we hear an entire generation speaking.
"A poignant inside look at what happened to ordinary citizens when the movement that ousted Chiang Kaishek's totalitarianism turned against itself. Liang helps Americans understand the past that China's leaders must overcome to cope with the future."
-- The Chicago Sun-Times
"Three stories in one -- first, a graphic, I-was-there account of what it was like to grow up during the Cultural Revolution; second, a cliffhanger love story with a happy ending; and third, a poignant analysis of how Chinese people have tried and failed, and tried again, to break out of their past. Each of these accounts is worth reading on its own." -- The New York Review of Books
"A significant event in our understanding of China...compelling, detailed, and devastating."
-- The New Republic
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A harrowing adventure of growing up in China 1954-80
By Chris
This book, by Liang Heng, apparently co-written by his wife Miss Shapiro, is a very quick read, one of those books with a well-flowing style to its prose and simplicity and power of its description. You don't want to put it down.
It is a story of how Liang Heng grew up as his family was torn apart by the ever changing and eratic policies enforce by the state of which Chariman Mao sat at the helm. He was probably about five when his mother was branded a rightist devationist. She had been encouraged to make criticisms of the party during the "Let one hundred flowers bloom" campaign and after honestly thinking it over, decided to criticize her bosses at the local police department for elitism and abuse of power. Of course, the Hundred Flowers campaign was eventually transformed into a rectification campaign. His mother was sent to the countryside,eventually being able to return once a month home to see her children and face the frenzied abuse of her husband, a very indocrinated, humorless, pious party member and journalist at the local state run paper. Liang's father for political safety eventaully got a new wife who, like the father, also had questionable associations and links with the old KMT regime. This new wife was posted as a school teacher in a far away city and due to bureaucratic restrictions on movement, they could not see each other for many years.
The most vivid parts of the book deal with the cultural revolution. Liang Feng as a zealous primary school student, initially lifted himself up at the beginning of this time by making cartoons of his teachers accusing them of being capitalist roader,bourgeois counterrevolutionaries, etc. But soon, his father got caught up in the trap because he was an intellectual, had briefly been part of a KMT group during the dark days of Chiang Kai Shek and the rapacious landlords before he was exposed to Maoism, and so on. Liang was branded a "stinking intellectual's son" and shunned and sometimes physically abused by his peers. His father was forced to go through many "struggle sessions" and paraded around town in a dunce cap.
The Cultural Revolution years are indeed described with the most simple and powerful indepth vivideness. The Cultural revolution for Liang had many harrowing adventures including his participation in mock long march and a stay in Peking to be part of a Red Guard group at a Musical conservatory during which period Liang caught a glimpse of Chairman Mao. Another episode deals with the armed combat of the rival "conservative" and "rebel" Red Guard groups and all sorts of splinter groups fighting for control of the city of Changsa, Liang's home town. Liang Heng gets caught in the middle of one battle and witnesses horrible death and destruction. He eventually joined a street gang made up of children of counterrevolutionaries and of communist china's lowest class, what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat. He spent some time being a cart pusher and custodian of a pig pen on a train,under the mentorship of the wise old migrant worker and street person Pockmarked Liu.
The climax of the book's vividness is probably when Liang Heng's father is transfered to the countryside for hard labor in a peasant commune. The particular commune where they are sent is in a very neglected area and the peasants very benighted. Liang's dad is assigned the duty of teaching Chairman Mao thought sessions to the peasants. Liang and his father are forced to live with a peasant and his wife, who have serious difficulty accomodating them. Unfortunately, Peking had launched another mass movement this time about elminating capitalist practices, and so the local leadership used the opportunity to harrass the peasants. The state gave this particular commune, in contrast to other areas, not much resources, and the peasants could only survive by raising revenue by selling produce from their livestock which was now being confiscated. During this episode, there are such notable incidents as Guo La Da' and the confiscation of his ducks. (...) The peasants in this commune seemed to be able to be more independent, beyond the reach of indoctrination if only because the government couldn't quite afford to put its tentacles into their remote area. Another incident deals with the hard suffering of Guo Lucky Wealth's wife, the wife of the peasant household they stayed in. She wanted to get pregnant but she had been manipulated into getting a birth control device put inside her. Guo Lucky Wealth's wife enlisted the services of a local witch doctor to make her fertile, but the witch doctor couldn't get quite the right potions.
After this point, the story loses some of its vividity as the events in his life are told more briefly. But it still is very interesting. By the early 70's, Liang Heng started to get some breaks, including being assigned a decent job at a factory to while he played for the factory's basketball team. He admits that though living standards on the whole improved(only slightly for all too many he claims) in China from the dark days of the KMT, he began to fully grasp that the cruelty, stratification and corruption in the economy and government in his society was quite different from the propaganda conception of what socialism was supposed to be. He tried to pursue girlfriends but his unfortunate political status ruined those relationship. Then he managed to get bribe his factory party officials and others to help him get accepted into college. This was after the lunacies of the Cultural revolution had died down and colleges were reoopened for competitive examination after the "Gang of Four" and their followers were purgedd after Mao's death. He eventually met Miss Shapiro who was working as a foreign language teacher at his college and fell in love with her. After college, his first postition was that of a school teacher and was dissapointed that though the post-Mao era was seemingly enacting great changes, the students he taught still exhibited the same inability to think critically that his generation had. The students still had alot of their time devoted to blindly memorizing the same silly Party slogans and being trained to worship the state, as Liang did as a youngster.
51 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
Simply told, poignant memoir of enormous events
By I. Westray
Son of the Revolution is a spare book, the sort of small biography you might pick up and read in a couple of days some weekend. It packs an enormous punch, though. Liang Heng, its author, experienced essentially every side of the cultural revolution in China, and his graceful, somewhat understated prose only acts as a sort of smooth surface to the roiling undercurrent of those huge events.
This book often gets assigned as a college-level textbook for History courses, and it's easy to see why. Liang Heng literally experienced almost everything about the cultural revolution first hand. In the course of the book, he lives both sides of almost any set of events you can think of. For example, as a young boy he's involved in a revolutionary group that's excitedly denouncing capitalist influences at its school. In a fit of enthusiasm, he draws a scathing poster of a favorite teacher. Almost immediately he feels tremendously guilty over the drawing. His father and he talk about the teacher's reaction, and Liang Heng goes to apologize. Then, just when the teacher's benevolence and the father's wisdom seem to have smoothed over this pang of overzealousness in the student, Liang Heng discovers that his father, too, has been denounced in a poster, and that he himself has been shut out of his revolutionary group -- as the son of an intellectual. Within a single day he's gone from revolutionary youth to excluded son of a reactionary. He goes home that night to find his sisters threatening to move away to live at school, so as to distance themselves from his supposedly traitorous father. His father sits whispering, almost to himself, that the children should sincerely believe in the party and Mao, and that things will turn out right if they do so.
This book is filled with tumultuous turns like that. Just when you've seen the sharp edge of one dilemma, it changes shape and presents another side. Throughout all those twists, Liang Heng keeps a sympathy for those around him that brings you through the book. He can understand why people caught in these events acted like they did, and he doesn't seem to really hate anyone for it despite all he's been through. His father and mother, who divorced early during the revolution because of his mother's political background, become very different objects of sympathy, but neither one is regarded with disdain. (His father, in particular, becomes the sort of quietly tragic figure you'd find in some sprawling Russian historical novel.)
Other English language memoirs from these years in China don't approach the startling emotional clarity of this book. Life and Death in Shanghai, in particular, comes across as both shallower and more bitter. Son of the Revolution tells the entire story, first hand, with a sort of forgiveness, a sort of understanding, that I haven't forgotten in the six years since I first read it.
This is worth a rare (for me) five stars.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Angela's Ashes in Red China
By Rottenberg's rotten book review
When consolidating their rule over the most populous nation on Earth, the Red Chinese sought to create a modern industrialized state in place of a feudal and disorganized one. Requiring more than rapid industrialization to realize their goals, the communists also sought to suffuse every sector of Chinese society with rigid political mentality requiring not only strict party loyalty, but a state of constant revolution, in which individuals and communities constantly sought to prove their mastery of "revolutionary discipline". Various miniature revolutions shake China - turning friends and relatives against each other - with fearful consequences for those who couldn't convince the more politically reliable of their strongly "revolutionary" desires. Because the meaning of the revolution itself is vague, even those who would have thought their backgrounds free of "black marks", find themselves under the gun - whether because of views an individual no longer professes, or association with others having displayed a lack of revolutionary discipline or simply because one may comply with a dictate only to find the Party changed direction completely.
Liang Heng, whose birth coincided with Ho Chi Minh's epic victory over the French in 1954, suffered for all the above reasons. Never a "rightist" himself, Heng suffered horribly during China's ten year political unrest of the 1960's and 70's. Heng's mother, a loyal party member in the late 1950's, reluctantly obeys the party's order to criticize superiors during the "Hundred Flowers" movement. Heng, like many, is never sure if the follow-up to the "Flowers" (in which those who faithfully criticized their elders were then rounded up for their insuboridination) was a knee jerk reaction to the unexpected ferocity the earlier campaign engendered, or whether the earlier movement was intended to weed out those critics to begin with. Only the consequences - in which Heng's mother must wear the feared "rightist cap", forever soilng her revolutionary record and that of her family - is considered. When Heng's father, who writes for the Hunan daily, becomes suspect for his admitted youthful infatuation with the nationalistic Koumintang, the family's political reputation suffers even more. Though loyal communists, Heng finds his father's name listed as an enemy on the many revolutioanry placards around their home city of Changsha. The Party maxim's - stressing tolerance for those whose backgrounds evince youthful mistakes - does little for Heng, since the revolution is guided by fervor and not nuance. And, though Maosim meant that party loyalty superceded family loyalty (sorry Confucious), it didn't prevent family members from suffering for political sins of family members.
Through the turmoil - which evolves from parades to open warfare in the street using everything from sticks and stones to missiles - Heng avoids sanctimony. Heng suffered much of the chaos as a child, and isn't above admitting that he too wrote some revolutionary placards himself. He works hard to rehabilitate his father whose first major action is to cast out Heng's mother for her "rightist cap". Experience proved the decision, for its pain, proved correct, if insufficient, to protect the family. "Old Liang" himself suffered mightily for the cause, never once complaining. As a middle-aged exile, forced to bring the revolution to the peasants by joing them, Heng's father survived the indiginities of a country-bound city-types, never pausing to warm the lives of the peasants with Marxist fervor. Heng's private revolution, unlike the larger one surrounding him, is about nuance, and the narrative never attempts to surpass the perspective of a child of Heng's age during the cultural revolution. Like the more recent "Angela's Ashes", Heng knows that the more credible narrator is the one who feels and experiences rather than faithfully records. And the experience, rather than one of victimization is of survival. The revolution's true enemies are long gone by the time the cultural revolution degenerates into civil war, and only Heng's clear and non-judgmental narrative can spot that the war's victims and instigators are one and the same.
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