Portland, ME: MerwinAsia, 2018. x, 352 pp. US$48.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-937385-75-0.
First published in Chinese in 1987, and in twenty chapters, this novel unfolds the unpleasant experiences of a teenager, the author himself, during the violent Red Guard movement from 1966 to 1967—the two most tumultuous years of China’s decade-long Cultural Revolution. The confessions are not those of the author, since he committed no crime or wrongdoing. The work is, as Liang Xiaosheng said in the preface of its 2006 Chinese reprint, “a literary work” that sharply criticizes the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, a few people in the book, such as Liang’s homeroom teacher and his neighbour Uncle Lu, are partially fictionalized to embody ordinary middle school teachers and people from different walks of life. Yet, the book ought to be read as a personal memoir since Liang has primarily recounted actual events and people that he encountered during those years, rather than as fictional stories surrounding the protagonists.
The translation of this novel makes a valuable contribution to both the existing recollective literature and the scholarship on the Red Guard movement in the West. Ever since Liang Heng’s Son of Revolution in 1984, numerous memoirs and novels about individual lives during the Cultural Revolution have been published in English. Most of these works are written by either victims or eyewitnesses who recount individual distress or social devastation caused by the revolution, but few, with the exception of Gao Yuan’s Born Red, have revealed how the Red Guard movement emerged and progressed among the youth in a school of secondary education. In comparison with Born Red, which relates a story set in a county seat, Liang’s novel depicts the Red Guard movement not only in his middle school, but in the larger context of the city of Harbin, a provincial capital in Northeast China with many modern factories and colleges. Liang’s often emotional observations of the Red Guards’ activities in a broader scene enables him to remember more dramatic kinds of violence—from the torture of school teachers and class enemies within his neighbourhood to bloody factionalist fights between Red Guard groups who employed armoured vehicles and tanks to destroy their opponents. The broader scene also provides Liang more opportunities to observe some unique people and events, such as the role played by Mao Yuanxin, the leader of a major Red Guard group at the Harbin Military Engineering College and Chairman Mao’s only nephew. To the current scholarship, Liang’s work provides a useful variation. While scholars such as Andrew Walder and Elizabeth Perry have mostly done their research set in major political centers like Beijing and Shanghai, Liang’s personal memoir offers a vivid account of what the Red Guard movement in a provincial centre was like.
This novel most impressively illustrates how a self-imposed Orwellian society became possible in China. When the country fell into anarchy from 1966 to 1967—as the local political authority was carried away by the Red Guards’ violent rebellion—the people who were no longer being watched by the party would still consciously keep an eye on one another. Young teens vigilantly reported imagined reactionary symbols to local public security institutions, and public security officers genuinely believed a case of counterrevolutionary conspiracy fabricated by a mental patient, for example. Liang depicts this type of Orwellian mentality as the result of ideological brainwashing, especially through formal education, which indoctrinated young students with Maoist theory of class struggle, to hate class enemies. The hatred, Liang shows, created fear among the people—fear of being characterized as a class enemy, fear of lagging behind political activities, and fear of being accused of involvement in some reactionary secret. Throughout the novel, the reader can sense how fear had become mental torture for ordinary people as well as for middle school teens. It is easy to see why, under the influence of fear, a young student—in order to qualify to join his school’s Red Guard—might expose the questionable personal history of his father despite the subsequent fatal consequences, and how this mentally twisted young man might later commit murder after raping a beautiful girl. And why Liang, in order to retain his Red Guard membership, kept his father’s questionable history a secret so that he could claim being the son of a politically upstanding family. The worst of this Orwellian society, Liang suggests, is that there were too many people, the Maoist “masses,” who were fond of revolution and always wanted more action to satisfy their hatred of class enemies. Experienced with the political activities of the frenzied masses, Liang tries to convince his readers that the Cultural Revolution had unleashed the evil that was skulking in the minds of tens of thousands of people.
This novel is useful for understanding Maoist society, particularly for Chinese readers. The current Chinese leadership appears to no longer consider the Cultural Revolution a disaster, but rather, as an inevitable mistake made in China’s quest for socialist development. With China’s economic success in the post-Mao era, current leadership has tried to minimize the impact of past mistakes by burying the history of the Cultural Revolution. Had Liang’s novel been written today, it would likely not have been published. It is China that needs more books like Liang’s.
Although the translation is fine, the absence of an introduction by the translator makes this novel difficult to read. As the initial storms of the Red Guard movement have become remote in the memories of older generations, and are unfamiliar to younger generations in China, it could be even harder for Western audiences with little background knowledge to grasp Liang’s account of the events that happened five decades ago in Harbin. The translator needed to include an introduction to explain why this book was selected and why some parts, such as chapter 6 in the original, were left out of the translation. At the least, the translator needed to footnote important political leaders and unique terms such as “red fives,” “black sevens,” and “Three Family Village” that appear so alien to a reader in the West.
Yixin Chen
University of North Carolina, Wilmington, USA