The White-Haired Child: Bittersweet Adventure of a Little Red Soldier

This book was a gift, literally and... I knew nothing of the Cultural Revolution. This memoir was an introduction and an education into a devasting and horrendous period of time in China, told by a young girl whose educated parents were punished as traitors to the state. Despite that blemish on her record, she strives to be Mao's Best Kid, and model Chinese. Bright and resourceful, she learns for herself. Beautifully written, with stark and grim detail. I still get shivers thinking of the fear and insecurity when corrupt neighbors would betray friends. When the police might come and take your family away.

This book held me captive until I finished it. Jaia, and her husband Douglas, have created a wonderful picture of growing up during the Cultural Revolution. I felt as if I had been transported to China during those days and was right there, living out the same experiences as Jaia. This book is a must for anyone even slightly interested in China, its people, its culture and its history.

While reading this book, I could see similarities between stories that my parents told me about their experiences. This book accurately depicts the grueling life they went through during the Cultual Revolution, and the everyday fears of survival. The fear of not being able to trust your next door neighbor for fear of betrayal. The fear of not being able to trust even your best friend. Accurate, moving, and told it a concise narrative style, this book is a must read account of life in China.

This is an individual perspective on the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath by a very positive young woman who experienced a terrible state of affairs but came through. The anecdotes are interesting, and the dysfunctional family (especially the document-forging, lock-picking father) never ceases to amaze. The co-authors make for some interesting and fresh usages of Chinese words, such as "ghost-mixing" (for the Chinese gui3 hun4, approximately equivalent to scr--ing around). This book provides good background for some of the excellent contemporary fiction now appearing in English on this period, such as Geling Yan's new book, "White Snake and Other Stories."

We take a distressing amount of our freedom -- not just social, but psychological, personal freedom: the freedom to disagree, to conjure, to scheme, to fabricate a place for ourselves in the world from scratch. Revolutionary China, if this memoir serves as an accurate depictor, was a place where such luxuries were brutally denied. And, from the look of it, that's the first step towards impoverishing humanity as a whole. The book summons up that China as a PLACE, not simply a news report, where even the simplest forms of self-assertion become openly painful. If the book has a flaw, it's in that it ends slightly too soon -- I wanted to hear more about Jaia's flight from China and life in the USA, but maybe she's saving that for her next book?