RED SORROW: A Memoir

"In June 1966... [m]y hometown, Shanghai, smelled like it was burning," writes Nanchu in this searing memoir of her experiences as witness, victim and participant in the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao's violent 10-year program, which set youths and workers against broadly designated "class enemies." The author watched Red Guards publicly torture and humiliate her parents, then became a Red Guard herself and was sent to a rural village to perform debilitating physical labor, was denied a formal education and a normal adolescence, and forced to belie her beliefs and back-stab friends in order to survive. Beneath her individual tragedy looms some of China's recent deep wounds and the story of the desperate attempts by Nanchu's generation to salvage normal life from a regime that coerced loyalty and devalued human lives. Since the early '80s, writings on the Cultural Revolution (or "scar literature") have multiplied in China. This particular memoir, aimed at the Western reader, sometimes slips into all-too-easy catharsis: Nanchu often skirts difficult questions raised by events in which victim and victimizer were often interchangeable. She only superficially reflects on her own participation in the destruction and sometimes resorts to sentimentality and platitudes to resolve political and emotional complexities. Her usually fluid, conversational prose is peppered with stilted translations of stock phrases that don't make sense in English. Her memoir certainly adds to the pool of personal testimonies of China's historical nightmare, but it may disappoint those wishing to reach deeper into these tragedies and the darkness in human nature that made them possible. 8 pages b&w photos not seen by PW. 20,000 first printing. (July)