Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

With the help of dictionaries which some professors lent me, I became acquainted with Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and American history. I memorized the whole of the Declaration of Independence, and my heart swelled at the words “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal,” and those about men’s “unalienable Rights,” among

Mao offered a magic cure to the peasants: “doctors” who could be turned out en masse—barefoot doctors. “It is not at all necessary to have so much formal training,” he said. “They should mainly learn and raise their standard in practice.” On 26 June 1965 he made the remark which became a guideline for health and education: “The more books you read,

In the days after Mao’s death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his “philosophy” really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need—or the desire?—for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history, and tha

It was unforgivable for me to be good only at English, my subject. These army tasks were political assignments, and I had to prove myself in them. Ironically, in the army itself, good marksmanship and other military skills would lead to a soldier being condemned as “white and expert.”

I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West’s technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion,

In 1989 an official who had been working in famine relief told me that he believed that the total number of people who had died in Sichuan was seven million. This would be 10 percent of the entire population of a rich province. An accepted estimate for the death toll for the whole country is around thirty million.

It was at this time that Mao gave full vent to his half-baked dream of turning China into a first-class modern power. He called steel the “marshal” of industry, and ordered steel output to be doubled in one year—from 5.35 million tons in 1957 to 10.7 million in 1958. But instead of trying to expand the proper steel industry with skilled workers, he

One day, after warning us for the umpteenth time against the road taken by Russia, our politics teacher said: “If you aren’t careful, our country will change color gradually, first from bright red to faded red, then to gray, then to black.” It so happened that the Sichuan expression “faded red” had exactly the same pronunciation (er-hong) as my nam

The peasants thanked Chairman Mao for punishing him. No one questioned his guilt, or the degree of his responsibility. I sought him out, on my own, and asked him his story. He seemed pathetically grateful to be asked. “I was carrying out orders,” he kept saying. “I had to carry out orders….” Then he sighed: “Of course, I didn’t want to lose my post