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Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now (平装)
by Jan Wong
| Market price: ¥ 268.00
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¥ 248.00
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 11 items |
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Publishers Weekly, USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
This superb memoir is like no other account of life in China under both Mao and Deng. Wong is a Canadian ethnic Chinese who, in 1972, at the height of the cultural revolution, was one of the first undergraduate foreigners permitted to study at Beijing University. Filled with youthful enthusiasms for Mao's revolution, she was an oddity: a Westerner who embraced Maoism, appeared to be Chinese and wished to be treated as one, although she didn't speak the language. She set herself to become fluent, refused special consideration, shared her fellow-students rations and housing, their required stints in industry and agriculture and earnestly tried to embrace the Little Red Book. Although Wong felt it her duty to turn in a fellow student who asked for help to emigrate to the West, she could not repress continual shock at conditions of life, and by the time she was nearly expelled from China for an innocent friendship with a "foreigner," much of her enthusiasm, which lasted six years, had eroded. In 1988, returning as a reporter for the Toronto Globe Mail, she was shocked once again, this time by the rapid transformations of the society under Deng's exhortation: "to be rich is glorious." Her account is informed by her special background, a cold eye, a detail. Her description of the events at Tiananmen Square, which occurred on her watch, is, like the rest of the book, unique, powerful and moving.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. -This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Kirkus Reviews, USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
A crackerjack journalist's (she's a George Polk Award winner) immensely entertaining and enlightening account of what she learned during several extended sojourns in the People's Republic of China. A second-generation Canadian who enjoyed a sheltered, even privileged, childhood in Montreal, Wong nonetheless developed a youthful crush on Mao Zedong's brand of Communism. She first visited China in 1972 on summer holiday from McGill University. Although the PRC was still convulsed by the so-called Cultural Revolution, the starry-eyed author enrolled in Beijing University and remained in the country for 15 months. Emotionally bloodied but unbowed by quotidian contact with the harsher realities of Maoism, Bright Precious Wong (as she was known to fellow students and party cadres) mastered Chinese and searched for ways to express solidarity with the masses. Leaving the PRC only long enough to earn a degree from McGill, the author returned in the fall of 1974 for a lengthy stay that made her increasingly aware of Chinese Communism's contradictions and evils.
Disturbing encounters with dissidents raised her consciousness of the regime's oppressive policies. Although her zeal diminished, Wong soldiered on, eventually acquiring an American spouse (perhaps the only US draft dodger to seek asylum in the PRC) and a correspondent's job with the New York Times. When President Carter pardoned Vietnam War resisters, the author and her husband came back to North America. She returned to China in 1988 as the Beijing bureau chief of The Toronto Globe & Mail. Experiencing something akin to culture shock at the changes wrought by Deng Xioaping's capitalist-road programs, Wong was an eyewitness to the bloody Tiananmen Square confrontation. She ferreted out long-suppressed truths about penal colonies, the use of prisoners as unpaid laborers, and the public execution of criminals. Tellingly detailed recollections of the journeys of an observant and engaged traveler through interesting times. (Author tour)
Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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The Gazette , USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
A marvellous book by one of Canada’s best-ever foreign correspondents at the top of her form. |
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The Globe and Mail, USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
Totally captivating. A wonderful memoir. |
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The Financial Post, USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
A lovely read. One can only hope this book is the first of many. |
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The Edmonton Journal, USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
A must-read for all China watchers. |
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The Washington Post , USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
A splendid memoir: funny, self-mocking, biting and perceptive. |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
Red China Blues is one of the best books on China I have read. Jan Wong really knows her subject. I lived in China for two years, including some of the time she was there, so I could really relate to what she wrote. An easy and quick read by an excellent writer. Her description of the Tian'anmen massacre is one of the best I have read. This book is both educational and entertaining. I particularly liked how she described her infatuation with Mao Zedong when she first went to China as a teen-ager and how she gradually became disillusioned with him and the system. |
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John (MSL quote), USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
Red China Blues is an intensely personalized historical account that covers nearly a quarter-century in China's recent and temultuous past. In this often humorous, often harrowing memoir, Jan Wong recounts her own rocky relationship with the nation of her ancestors. Having been raised in a middle-class family in Canada, the daughter of a successful Chinese restaraunteur, Wong travels to the People's Republic of China in 1972-the height of the Cultural Revolution-as one of only two Westerners permitted entrance to Bejing University. Naively devoted to the "Great Helmsman" Mao Zedong and determined to purge herself of bourgeois privilege and capitalist guilt, Wong fervently adopts the teachings of the Communist party and eagerly joins the tide of students who spend the better part of their University years laboring in the paddy fields. Her Communist fervor is such that she even turns in a fellow student who asks for Wong's help in going to the United States, and joins in chanting criticisms at an accused counter-revolutionary. A series of lies and propagandist maneuvers-including the University's attempt to expel her on false claims that her parents have asked her to return home-begin to unravel Wong's faith in the Party. Following the first silent uprising at Tiananmen Square after Premier Zhou Enlai's death in 1976, Wong comes to a startling realization: "Nobody believed in the revolution anymore.
They hadn't for a long time, and I had been too stupid to see it." In the aftermath of Mao's death and the declaration of the end of the Cultural Revolution the same year, she also begins to understand the nature of China's system of rule: "One announcement, and we were consigned to the dust heap of history. That, I suddenly realized, was how dictatorships worked. Overnight, every single person I knew made an abrupt ideological swtich." Years later, the author's metamorphosis is complete when she returns to China as a reporter for the Toronto Globe & Mail, and watches ! the massacre of Tiananmen Square from her balcony at Bejing Hotel. She paints a vivid, horrifying picture of the days of violence and chaos, when soldiers opened fire on their own people and tanks mowed down protestors in cold blood. Over and over again, the mass of protestors--comprised of students, police, and ordinary citizens--stampedes away from the army's gun volleys, only to regroup and come back for more. Red China Blues is a fascinating read for anyone interested in recent Chinese history, but the scope of the book is broader than that. It is about human psychology - our incredible willingness to be led, our instinctual inclination for rebellion when the leaders we have vehemently followed overstep some invisible boundary. It is a criticism of absolutism delievered by a former absolutist, the story of how an idealist young girl came to realize that no single nation, party, or political regime possesses a monopoly on truth. |
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Chris (MSL quote), USA
<2008-01-08 00:00>
From Elisabeth Sherwin's Printed Matter on the Web site: "Red China Blues recounts the story of changing China. This is a one-of-a-kind memoir because Wong was actually a student in China during the Cultural Revolution. Years later, she returned to China as a Western journalist and found herself covering the Tiananmen Square massacre. Few people have lives quite as interesting." I thought [Red China Blues] would be of great interest to the students [at Peking University] since much of its action takes place right there in Peking. The end result was: '"Red China Blues," book discussion causes tempest at Peking University.' In the final analysis, the reaction to this book at Peking University is a testiment to its rating as one of the best books read in 1997. |
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