Vermilion Gate: An Extraordinary Story of Growing Up in Communist China

This book -- together with Gao Anhua's "To the Edge of the Sky", Jung Chang's "Wild Swans" and Nien Cheng's "Life and death in Shanghai" -- shows what Mao's China really looked from the inside, as opposed to an illusionary, idealistic Western narrative that by and large went unchallenged from 1949 until the nineties, and is still influential to this very day. Mu Aiping in particular, as well as Gao Anhua, describe in physically painful detail how the brutal destructiveness of Mao's rule lead to the most depressing result -- families destroying themselves by their own hand in the end, after having endured hardships that drove their members to insanity. Mu, Gao and Chang share three traits: They all were brought up by parents that joined Mao's cause early, they all struggled with what they allegorically perceived as God eating his followers, and they all settled in Great Britain marrying British husbands. In describing the atrocities, they also unwittingly show that they managed to get away with their bare lives only because, at critically important junctions, they were able to invoke old party friendships, gaining access to officials or intimidating their foes. It is left to the readers to guess the fate of those millions of ordinary Chinese that were left at the mercy of Mao because their families meant nothing to either the Red Guards or the purged Communist party elite alike. In 1949, Mao brought about an era that, in part, was a giant leap forward for China (think women's rights, or ending the warlord's feuds). However, his sadistic lust for destruction was playing itself out from the very beginning, and it was all-encompassing. He made China a madhouse for thirty years and longer. Mu Aiping, Gao Anhua, Nien Cheng and Jung Chang show the world what that meant. Think Beirut or Baghdad, albeit a hundred times worse. To sum up this reader's judgment: Anyone who, having read those books, still clings to the notion that China is longing for yet another upheaval in the coming two decades or so is dead wrong. And anyone who would still keep hanging a Warhol rendering of Mao's, even in the attic, does not have a human heart, period.

This is a very compelling read for anyone interested in memoirs and/or history. I, for one, came away with a much different perspective of the Cultural Revolution than I learned in my university courses. Yes, it is long, a criticism from another reader, and yet its length is part of its strength. One wonders how many times history was going to repeat itself under Mao. While it is a book about the rise of communism and how the cultural revolution took hold of China, it is also a story about a man and woman, their children, and the horrible toll that corruption in politics played in their lives.