Son of the Revolution: An Autobiography

This book, by Liang Heng, apparently co-written by his wife Miss Shapiro, is a very quick read, one of those books with a well-flowing style to its prose and simplicity and power of its description. You don't want to put it down. It is a story of how Liang Heng grew up as his family was torn apart by the ever changing and eratic policies enforce by the state of which Chariman Mao sat at the helm. He was probably about five when his mother was branded a rightist devationist. She had been encouraged to make criticisms of the party during the "Let one hundred flowers bloom" campaign and after honestly thinking it over, decided to criticize her bosses at the local police department for elitism and abuse of power. Of course, the Hundred Flowers campaign was eventually transformed into a rectification campaign. His mother was sent to the countryside,eventually being able to return once a month home to see her children and face the frenzied abuse of her husband, a very indocrinated, humorless, pious party member and journalist at the local state run paper. Liang's father for political safety eventaully got a new wife who, like the father, also had questionable associations and links with the old KMT regime. This new wife was posted as a school teacher in a far away city and due to bureaucratic restrictions on movement, they could not see each other for many years. The most vivid parts of the book deal with the cultural revolution. Liang Feng as a zealous primary school student, initially lifted himself up at the beginning of this time by making cartoons of his teachers accusing them of being capitalist roader,bourgeois counterrevolutionaries, etc. But soon, his father got caught up in the trap because he was an intellectual, had briefly been part of a KMT group during the dark days of Chiang Kai Shek and the rapacious landlords before he was exposed to Maoism, and so on. Liang was branded a "stinking intellectual's son" and shunned and sometimes physically abused by his peers. His father was forced to go through many "struggle sessions" and paraded around town in a dunce cap. The Cultural Revolution years are indeed described with the most simple and powerful indepth vivideness. The Cultural revolution for Liang had many harrowing adventures including his participation in mock long march and a stay in Peking to be part of a Red Guard group at a Musical conservatory during which period Liang caught a glimpse of Chairman Mao. Another episode deals with the armed combat of the rival "conservative" and "rebel" Red Guard groups and all sorts of splinter groups fighting for control of the city of Changsa, Liang's home town. Liang Heng gets caught in the middle of one battle and witnesses horrible death and destruction. He eventually joined a street gang made up of children of counterrevolutionaries and of communist china's lowest class, what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat. He spent some time being a cart pusher and custodian of a pig pen on a

I have read many books concerning people whose lives were destroyed by the Cultural Revolution in China, but none can compare to "Son of the Revolution." Liang Heng paints a very vivid and clear picture of life from an enthusiastic Mao Youth to a cynical, knowledge-starved young man. If there is any book out there that records the folly of both the Cultural Revolution and Communism in general, it would be this masterpiece. I have read this book many times, and each time I go over it I discover something new. If you are truly interested in a first-hand account of the brutality of the Communist Chinese regime or is in interested in a great read, you must get this book.

Son of the Revolution is a spare book, the sort of small biography you might pick up and read in a couple of days some weekend. It packs an enormous punch, though. Liang Heng, its author, experienced essentially every side of the cultural revolution in China, and his graceful, somewhat understated prose only acts as a sort of smooth surface to the roiling undercurrent of those huge events. This book often gets assigned as a college-level textbook for History courses, and it's easy to see why. Liang Heng literally experienced almost everything about the cultural revolution first hand. In the course of the book, he lives both sides of almost any set of events you can think of. For example, as a young boy he's involved in a revolutionary group that's excitedly denouncing capitalist influences at its school. In a fit of enthusiasm, he draws a scathing poster of a favorite teacher. Almost immediately he feels tremendously guilty over the drawing. His father and he talk about the teacher's reaction, and Liang Heng goes to apologize. Then, just when the teacher's benevolence and the father's wisdom seem to have smoothed over this pang of overzealousness in the student, Liang Heng discovers that his father, too, has been denounced in a poster, and that he himself has been shut out of his revolutionary group -- as the son of an intellectual. Within a single day he's gone from revolutionary youth to excluded son of a reactionary. He goes home that night to find his sisters threatening to move away to live at school, so as to distance themselves from his supposedly traitorous father. His father sits whispering, almost to himself, that the children should sincerely believe in the party and Mao, and that things will turn out right if they do so.This book is filled with tumultuous turns like that. Just when you've seen the sharp edge of one dilemma, it changes shape and presents another side. Throughout all those twists, Liang Heng keeps a sympathy for those around him that brings you through the book. He can understand why people caught in these events acted like they did, and he doesn't seem to really hate anyone for it despite all he's been through. His father and mother, who divorced early during the revolution because of his mother's political background, become very different objects of sympathy, but neither one is regarded with disdain. (His father, in particular, becomes the sort of quietly tragic figure you'd find in some sprawling Russian historical novel.)Other English language memoirs from these years in China don't approach the startling emotional clarity of this book. Life and Death in Shanghai, in particular, comes across as both shallower and more bitter. Son of the Revolution tells the entire story, first hand, with a sort of forgiveness, a sort of understanding, that I haven't forgotten in the six years since I first read it.This is worth a rare (for me) five stars.

The struggle of Liang Heng and his family to endure and survive the insanity of the Cultural Revolution makes for a gripping read. This was one of the first books I read on Maoist China and it remains one of the best.