China's Son - Growing Up in the Cultural Revolution

Da Chen’s autobiography China’s Son Growing Up in the Cultural Revolution (Delacorte Press. 2001) is an absolutely easy read.

It is an account of growing up in a small village in Fujian province, and the journey from a model student, to “counterrevolutionary” due to a landlord family background, to almost a drop-out, and eventually the first person from his village to study English in the prestigious Beijing First Foreign Language Institute.

The book is also an interesting account of the pressure faced by students during the college entrance examinations, where the pressure in the days after the Cultural Revolution seemed as intense as those faced by current students.

One area that was covered in the examination was “political studies” described by Chen as “the most boring of the five subjects required in the big exam” and “all about the twisted philosophy of the Communist party.”

“They sounded like sophistry at best, and that was what they were. It was like a carpet-cleaning salesman raving about this great revolution taking place in the carpet-cleaning industry, where actually none existed. And the machine he was trying to sell you wasn’t one bit as good as what he claimed. It was tedious self-promotion, mixed with a little bit of lying.”

“Many times I wanted to throw the book into the river. What was this? Marxism combined with Mao’s superior thoughts? It was simply some foreign garbage, stir-fried with local flavor until it became a dish called Communism, Chinese style. Moo goo gai pan with ketchup.”

“Some of the questions and explanations given were so far-fetched. I felt like spitting. Like why in the beginning of the revolution Mao had ordered his armies into the countryside instead of starting a revolt in the big city. The book said Mao was applying Marxism to China’s unique circumstances. That was bull. Mao was just running for his life.”

“He hadn’t even had time to wipe his ass. The Nationalists army was after his head and he’d had to flee into the woods. There had been no Marxism in his mind at that time. I almost puked as I read a whole chapter talking about the virtue of Mao’s one-liner “True knowledge comes from practice.” Yeah, right.”

“Well, he’d had plenty of practice, starting with dumping his ugly country-bumpkin first wife and crawling into bed with a chic Shanghai actress, while his army was chewing tree roots and getting their butts frozen in northern Shanghai ..”

How much of the above was what he thought then, and what he subsequently thought?