Sublime

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

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

In the early 1950s, a Communist was supposed to give herself so completely to the revolution and the people that any demonstration of affection for her children was frowned on as a sign of divided loyalties.

That night, as I lay in bed listening to the gunshots and the Rebels’ loudspeakers blaring out bloodcurdling diatribes, I reached a turning point. I had always been told, and had believed, that I was living in a paradise on earth, socialist China, whereas the capitalist world was hell. Now I asked myself: If this is paradise, what then is hell? I d

The need to obtain authorization for an unspecified “anything” was to become a fundamental element in Chinese Communist rule. It also meant that people learned not to take any action on their own initiative.