Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now

by Jan Wong

Jan Wong, a Canadian of Chinese descent, went to China as a starry-eyed Maoist in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. A true believer--and one of only two Westerners permitted to enroll at Beijing University--her education included wielding a pneumatic drill at the Number One Machine Tool Factory. In the name of the Revolution, she renounced rock & roll, hauled pig manure in the paddy fields, and turned in a fellow student who sought her help in getting to the United States. She also met and married the only American draft dodger from the Vietnam War to seek asylum in China.

Red China Blues is Wong's startling--and ironic--memoir of her rocky six-year romance with Maoism (which crumbled as she became aware of the harsh realities of Chinese communism); her dramatic firsthand account of the devastating Tiananmen Square uprising; and her engaging portrait of the individuals and events she covered as a correspondent in China during the tumultuous era of capitalist reform under Deng Xiaoping. In a frank, captivating, deeply personal narrative she relates the horrors that led to her disillusionment with the "worker's paradise." And through the stories of the people--an unhappy young woman who was sold into marriage, China's most famous dissident, a doctor who lengthens penises--Wong reveals long-hidden dimensions of the world's most populous nation.

In setting out to show readers in the Western world what life is like in China, and why we should care, she reacquaints herself with the old friends--and enemies of her radical past, and comes to terms with the legacy of her ancestral homeland.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Biography, Asia, Politics

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Jan Wong was the much-acclaimed Beijing correspondent for The Globe and Mail from 1988 to 1994. She is a graduate of McGill University, Beijing University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the recipient of a (US) George Polk Award, the New England Women’s Press Association Newswoman of the Year Award, the (Canadian) National Newspaper Award and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Silver Medal, among other honours for her reporting. Wong has also written for The New York Times, The Gazette in Montreal, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal.

Her first book, Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now, was named one of Time magazine’s top ten books of 1996 and remains banned in China. It has been translated into Swedish, Finnish, Dutch and Japanese, and optioned for a feature film.

Jan Wong is a third-generation Canadian, born and raised in Montreal. She first went to China in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution as one of only two Westerners permitted to enrol at Beijing University. There, she renounced rock music, wielded a pneumatic drill at a factory and hauled pig manure in the paddy fields. She also met and married the only American draft dodger from the Vietnam War in China. During those six years in China, she learned fluent Mandarin and earned a degree in Chinese history.

From 1988 to 1994, Jan Wong returned as China correspondent for The Globe and Mail. In reporting on the tumultuous new era of capitalist reforms under Deng Xiaoping, she reacquainted herself with old friends and enemies from her radical past. In 1989, she dodged bullets in Tiananmen Square, fought off a kidnapping attempt and caught the Chinese police red-handed driving her stolen Toyota as a squad car. (They gave it back.)

She returned to China in 1999 to make a documentary and to research her second book, Jan Wong’s China: Reports from a Not-So-Foreign Correspondent. It tells the story of China’s headlong rush to capitalism and offers fresh insight into a country that is forever changing.

Jan Wong lives with her husband and two sons in Toronto where she is a reporter at The Globe and Mail. The best of her weekly celebrity-interview columns, “Lunch With,” which ran for five years, have been published in a book of the same name.

[From Random House's Jan Wong Author Spotlight]

Reviews

[Martine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memoirs about life in twentieth-century China tend to be profoundly depressing. I remember reading Wild Swans as a student and being so utterly depressed afterwards that I seriously wondered if I really wanted to go on learning Chinese and becoming a sinologist. And then I went to China and realised that no, I most certainly did not want to be a career sinologist. China and I are a bad match, but that doesn't stop me from continuing to be fascinated by the country.

Of all the memoirs of life in twentieth-century China which have been published over the past twenty years, this is my favourite, precisely because it is not depressing. Sure, Wong describes some pretty shocking stuff, but for all that, the tone of her book is remarkably light-hearted. It's an easy, thoroughly engaging and occasionally mind-boggling memoir-cum-history of China which I highly recommend to anyone who is remotely interested in China.

The first half of the book is quite unique. In it, Wong (born into a fairly wealthy Canadian Chinese family) describes her teenage love affair with Maoism, which culminates in her visit to China in 1972, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. While shocked by the poverty she encounters, she decides to stay in China, becoming one of only two foreign students allowed to study at the newly reopened Beijing University. Eager to impress their two foreign guests, the authorities try to pamper then, only to find that Jan and her American fellow student Erica are devoted Maoists who, rather than having favours bestowed on them, want to become worker-soldier-peasant students just like their Chinese classmates. So when they're not learning Chinese by reading Mao and translations of Stalin, they shovel manure, work heavy equipment and break their backs harvesting aubergines and peanuts. While doing so, they encounter an awful lot of stuff that isn't quite right (and do some things themselves that are't completely right, either), but being young and naive and impossibly idealistic, they turn a blind eye. Wong ends up staying in China for six years, during which time her belief in Mao's brand of socialism very slowly erodes. From the reader's perspective, it takes an awful lot of time for her to realise that the Cultural Revolution is a disaster, but her misguided faith and enthusiasm do make for a very interesting read. Hers is a rare first-hand account of the Cultural Revolution from a brain-washed Westerner's point of view, and it's compelling stuff.

The second part of the book is less unique, but still fascinating. After a lengthy stint in North America, Wong returns to China in the late 1980s as a journalist, and decides to stay in Beijing when all hell breaks loose on Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and nearly all other foreigners are being evacuated from the country. Her account of the Tiananmen massacre is utterly compelling and chilling. She then goes on to describe meetings with dissidents, social ills in the countryside, the effects of China's new-found capitalism, etc., all the while drawing comparisons with the China she knew in the 1970s.

I guess one of the reasons why Red China Blues strikes such a chord with me is because in a way, Jan Wong's relationship with China mirrors my own. Like Wong, I went from infatuation with China to an acute dislike of the country. Needless to say, my own story isn't nearly as spectacular or dramatic as hers, but still, I recognise the feelings she describes.

Which is not to say that you have to be a disillusioned sinologist to appreciate this book. There's plenty to enjoy for non-sinologists. I have never read any of Jan Wong's columns in the Globe and Mail, but judging from this book, she is an excellent journalist. She is well-informed, has a good eye for odd and telling details and comes up with some very astute observations on China's past, present and future. Furthermore, she is honest and self-deprecating and gets good quotes from the locals because they trust her more than they do non-Chinese-looking-and-speaking journalists. It's easy to criticise Wong for being so terribly naive in the 1970s, but I for one found her portrayal of a genuinely deluded Maoist quite fascinating, not to mention frequently entertaining. As I said, it's a remarkably light-hearted book given the subject matter -- a nice change from all the serious, soul-crushing memoirs which have been published about life in China over the past twenty years. Very highly recommended to those who like well-written accounts of unusual lives and even more unusual historical developments.

[Andrew Milton · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good book about a most bizarre life…sort of. Well, half of a good book.

A young Canadian national wants to understand her roots, and returns to China…in 1972. At the beginning of the end of the Cultural Revolution she arrives a committed Maoist, and is soon allowed to enroll at Beijing University (one of only two Westerners given such permission, and explicitly by Zhou Enlai). When just about the last of the 700 million Chinese have abandoned any sense that Maoism is a system that could work, she is eager to reform herself through hard labor, and she craves the back-breaking farm labor that had substituted for education for so many years. And while her university comrades say what they know they’re supposed to say in order to bend with the madly swirling political winds, she earnestly criticizes herself, turns in others who ask her about how to get out to the West, and embraces the starvation diet—created by Party ineptitude, but proclaimed a proletarian virtue—as an appropriate tool of personal reform…it’s bourgeois to want to avoid hunger.

The interesting part of the book is to watch the difficulty with which Wong, writing in the 1990s, comes to terms with her own thinking and conduct. It is heartbreaking and infuriating at the same time. Even Wong sees, now, the ridiculousness of one of her student comrades boasting, “I am a peasant. I have no skills. I’m not smart at my studies. My political consciousness isn’t high. But there is one thing I do well. I loyally, fervently obey the Party’s orders.” It seems clear that at the time, Wong would have been pleased if she could so boast.

After 8 years, she leaves, disillusioned, but still holding out some hope that China has a chance to mark out a better path. What that path is and where that hope comes from isn’t exactly clear, but hope springs eternal….

She returns in 1988 as a reporter and witnesses the demonstrations and massacres in 1989. (She had seen the demonstrations at Tiananmen in 1976 following Zhou Enlai’s death, and in 1979 at the so-called Democracy Wall.) From her hotel room right off the square she witnesses a substantial portion of the killing, and the details she offers are important and depressing.

And for each death she saw, her former belief (naiveté?) turns into a rancorous antagonism, that makes the rest of the book much less satisfying. She takes great pains to now point out how corrupted and horrific the system really is. The problem is that her zeal is still abundant, but in the other direction, so she seems to lack perspective. Yes, it is useful and important to hear that China executes about 7000 people a year (more than 60% of the world total), or that drugs and prostitution have accompanied the capitalist expansion, or that amazing poverty persists in places where the capitalist road has yet to be built.

These are not the same, though, as the disagreement she has with her nanny over whether her newborn should use diapers or the traditional hole in the crotch pants. Intent on diapers she finally convinced the nanny to use disposables, having decided against cloth because they ARE silly—her emphasis. “After all, who used cloth toilet paper?” As many people as use polymer fiber (i.e., plastic) toilet paper?
Or her facile rationalizations about her cook. He was probably inflating the grocery bill, she says, but she kept him on because, “really, how many times in life could you find someone who made perfect roast chicken?” About as often as you find any useful information in reports of lunching with a celebrity guest and then deconstructing him or her in your column (as she now does for the Toronto Globe and Mail)?

And, if only the awkwardly shallow analysis stopped there. Reminiscing with on old party cadre from her time at Beijing University, he notes that the foreign students don’t want Chinese roommates anymore. Is there still any open-door schooling (labor and criticisms, being the bigger part of that program), Wong asks. No, now students want comfort and factories want to make money (so aren’t interested in inefficient workers press-ganged from universities).

“I felt a bid sad,” Wong writes. As difficult and crazy as my years at Beijing University had been, I had had a unique experience. Now, the students coming after me were having such a conventional time they might as well have been studying in Singapore or Taipei or Hong Kong.”

Hey, hey, insane social distortions that ruined people’s lives are better experiences than conventional education. Just look at Comrade Wong, she’s done just fine for herself. It reminds me of when I was in Hungary in 1987 thinking it was “cool,” “fun,” “interesting,” or whatever to be in a communist country…knowing the whole time that I got to leave.

Then she turns her weak insights to an explanation of how the one-child policy will create democracy because all sorts of spoiled little emperors will not cotton to the state telling them what to do. As one of her friends put it, “Everyone will want to tell everyone else what to do. You’ll have a democracy.”

Interesting notion of democracy. I've always thought of democracy as requiring a commitment to a set of electoral procedures for selecting the policy decision makers (who do get to tell us what to do, in some degree) which involves accepting an outcome that you may not like.

In any case, just like Americans, she says, the only children of China are growing up self-centered individualists. Where does Wong conceptually fit all those self-centered Americans who professed an intent to flee to Canada following a Bush re-election…but didn’t?

Maybe those are the post-Vietnam Americans who have no sense of history, just like the post-Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Chinese, she notes. I guess that’s why we’ve been rehashing the Vietnam experience for the last 30 years, whereas Chinese have left murals of Mao’s revolutionary sayings plastered on their houses—the better to convince the passing Red Guards that you’re adequately revolutionary and so don’t need to be reformed by having your house ransacked—for the last 30 years. (Sure, I know people who marched around their backyards chanting about Ho Chi Minh, and they're usually sheepish about it now...and they're lawyers.)

As Peter Hessler, the author of the consistently brilliant River Town, pointed out such a house to several of us, he observed that the Chinese have not taken any accounting of the social and political effects of the Cultural Revolution. Consider a google search of “syllabus Vietnam” to see how little accounting Americans have taken of Vietnam.

I couldn't make it to the end...where Wong attends the official celebration of Mao's 100th birthday.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jan Wong,a Canadian journalist of Chinese ancestry, in this illuminating volume writes of her experiences as an ardent young Maoist in the early 1970's who actually went to China to work and study.
She hauled pig manure in a Chinese re-education farm, and at Beijing University she turned in a fellow student who had begged her help to escape to the West.
Slowly she realized the evil of the Communist system in China and was repatriated to the West in 1978.
Wong returned years later as an undercover journalist to China where she covered the Tianmen Square Massacre, in which three thousand pro-democracy students were mowed down in cold blood by Red China's army, on the orders of dictator, Jian Zemin.
She also covered China's contradictory development into a capitalist state under a Communist dictatorship, or a Communist dictatorship with a capitalist economy...akin to Fascism!
She covers the Tianmen Square Massacre of 1989, letting the the reader know of some of the lesser known details, and how the Communist army opened fire on the students after they began leaving the square:
"A [...]girl was killed and they just brought her body back...After the third barrage I counted more than twenty bodies. One cyclist was shot in the back right below our balcony. There were two big puddles of blood on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. People carried the body of a little girl towards the back of the hotel. After twenty three more minutes, a few people gathred up enough courage to aproach the wounded. The soldiers let loose another blast, sending the would be rescuers scurrying for cover. The crowd was enraged. I grimly kept track of the time. An hour later, the wounded were still on the ground, bleeding to death.
She speaks of the great poverty of the new Red China, with inequalities far greater than anything in the liberal democracies of the world, and crushing poverty in the rural provinces. Despite economic changes, China remains a brutal dictatorship, with no political liberalization or democratization having been allowed by the iron grip of the Communist Party.
Peeople are still opresed in day-to-day life. People are not allowed to own dogs, and to deal with a fad of people acquiring dogs as pets in the early 1990s, special police squads swept through the neigbourhoods, strangling dogs with steel wire looped at the end of metal poles.
The author recounts some regret at buying into the Communist lie, with the realization that "The Western world, especially Canada, is far more socialistic than China has ever been, with it's free public education, universal medicare, unemployment insurance, and government funding for television ads against domestic violence. China has made me appreciate my own country, with it's tiny ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters. I had gone all the way to China to find an idealistic revolutionary society, when I already had it right to home."
She ends of on a positive note, predicting, in 1997, a great change in China , and the death of the Communist Party, and real democracy.
Ten years later, this is not close to being realized, with a tightening of political control by the Communist dictatorship having taken place.
Despite being one of the most brutal dictatorships on this planet, China has gained international acceptibility, without improving democracy or human rights!
Nobody bats an eyelid at the Olympic Games for 2008 being set in Beijing.
The worst abuses of the Communist regime has it's apologists in the WEst.
The Stalinist Workers World Party in North America, (which has praised Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and applauded suicide bombings against Jewish women and chidren in Israel) congratulated the Chinese regime after the Tianmen Square Massacre, for having 'won a battle against imperialist and counter-revolutionary forces."
The fact that such sentiments can be uttered makes one wonder how far the world has actually come.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wong was the best kind of journalist on China, combining outside with inside perspectives, personal with political life, and moral indignation with empathy. Her books have been an antidote to our self-righteous judgments (and punishments) on other nations for how they have dealt with their challenges. Here's a quote on the economic and political challenges China has faced in recent decades:

"In a frank report, the Chinese Academy of Science predicted a post-Deng [Deng Xiaoping] power-struggle between Beijing and the provinces. It warned that China could disintegrate like a "post-Tito Yugoslavia" unless drastic steps were taken to halt mounting regionalism. Rich provinces like coastal Guangdong have nothing in common with landlocked, impoverished Gansu. Already, wealthy regions balk at remitting taxes to the central government. Poor regions are voting with their feet. About 110 million peasants, the biggest migration in world history, have flooded the cities in search of work. Unlike Maoist times, they are under no one's control, a nightmarish problem for the central government" (pp. 385-386).

[Ensiform · Rating 4 out of 5]

The tale of the Chinese-Canadian author’s long path from a deluded, naïve red-to-the-core Maoist to a cynical reporter who sees just how wrong she was. Wong’s life is enthralling in its sheer unlikeliness, even if Wong herself comes off as an unrepentant spoiled fool in the first half of the book. Wong dismisses the concerns of her wealthy father (born in Canada, the son of an emigrant) to become one of only two Westerners allowed to attend Beijing University in 1972, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, and demands to work in the fields, so she can be “purified” by labor. She is far too stupid to understand that Mao’s policies were insane and destructive, and actually believed what millions of Chinese knew to be madness. If Wong were Chinese, she’d be merely naïve, or a tool of the system – as an educated Canadian who should have known better, she comes off as dangerously stupid, and her book is full of excuses and alibis for her actions. She takes pains to cite the turbulent political times, the anti-American sentiment, her youth… but those are not valid excuses. Millions of Americans criticized their government in the ‘60s and ‘70s without swallowing Mao’s gnomish madness, and tens of millions of teenagers may have impulsive tendencies but manage not to be raving absolutists about things which are obviously untrue.

So the first half of the book is infuriating, though still fascinating. Very early into Wong’s first visit to China, she started noticing that the Cultural Revolution had trashed standards throughout China, that “some people seemed more equal than others,” that food stores were sparse; but still she remains deluded and committed to Maoism. What kind of mind must she have had to be so blind? At one point she is so brainwashed (not, it must be noted, by anyone but her own faulty reasoning and stupidity) she denounces students who want her help to escape China. Wong realizes that this was a low point in her development, but she maintains a defensive attitude about even this, comparing herself to other Chinese denouncers. (She doesn’t seem to realize that they, who had to live there, may have had practical reasons to denounce others, such as to avoid more severe punishment for loved ones who may have been implicated.) As with all brainwashed zealots, it is only after her personal desires or freedoms are impacted that she truly begins to question what she believes: “I was sick of the double standard… How dare he interfere in my life. I had changed… I refused to endure the same kind of humiliation every Chinese endured,” she writes about the authorities’ attempts to prevent her from seeing her future husband. Wong’s stupidity and self-interest is rather pathetic, and she is a highly unsympathetic narrator – but as I say, the book is fascinating, if only because her experiences are so unreal and rare. After her apostasy, the book gets even more interesting, because of Wong’s unique ability to blend in with the Chinese people and get stories for the New York Times. She writes about the lead-up to the Tiananmen reprisals, when students went on “hunger strikes” in turns (with snack breaks), and how it suddenly turned from a rather jovial sit-in to a massacre. She gives in-depth reports on execution fields and the practicalities of summary executions; she visits entire villages made retarded and dwarfed by pollution; she investigates modern women trafficking; and she marvels at the breakneck pace of China’s embrace of capitalism, with its McDonald’s run by ex-cadre leaders, the new extravagance of penis and breast reconstruction (though the former has roots in China’s early rural economy, when boys had their penises bitten off by feral pigs as they defecated in fields at night). “Even my maid had a maid,” she writes, bemused at the changes. At this point Wong seems very clear-headed, but even late in the book, she claims that China was “an unrelentingly pure country” in 1980 because guards didn’t take bribes, compared to the pervasive bribery rampant in China today. But surely she realizes that bribery sprouts from lawlessness, and the lack of bribery is more likely rooted in fear of a mad despot than some ideological “purity” that never existed? It left me wondering if Wong ever really learned a lesson, or just got tired of being treated like a Chinese person. That aside, it’s a fascinating look at Chinese written from a unique perspective.

[Bryan Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a book I looked forward to after finding her work through CBC's Definitely Not the Opera. That and reports on China fascinated me since I started surfing the web and found BBC's James Reynolds because of the challenges brought on by state censorship.

I will just say this now, Jan Wong does not disappoint. From her own Marxist views that inspired her to travel there, and even study at Beijing University, to her developing career as a reporter covering China, Wong weaves reportage and memoir together to provide a clear picture of China as rulers and policies change. Not to mention an excellent journey into Wong's experience as she explores her ancestral heritage and initial interest for Marx, Lenin, and Mao's philosophies.

Those looking for a good travel memoir should check this one out!

[NinaCD · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a different perspective on the culture revolution. Written by a Canadian-born Chinese who returned to China as a die-hard Maoist during the heat of Cultural Revolution and direct-enrolled in Beida. She became fluent in Chinese and married a fellow ex-pat, going on to settle in Beijing as a reporter for the foreign press. She witnessed the entire Tiananmen disaster and I've never read an account as detailed as the one in this book, taking up more than a full chapter. Her perspective on the transition in power between the 70's and 80's is mind-opening. While she is always cheering for Chinese to succeed, she does not hesitate to criticize the government and all the while also holds onto nostalgic sentiment for her Maoist days of youth.

[Michael Gerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

A revealing memoir from one who can be said to have had been to hell and back, Red China Blues chronicles one woman's flirtation with Mao and his thoughts and actions, her immersion in real-life Chinese society under Mao and his successors.

[Meghana · Rating 5 out of 5]

AMAZING. Anyone who's ever read her writing - on a variety of topics from human interest stories to celebrity interviews - knows that Jan Wong can be scathing, zealous, and laugh-out-loud funny, often much to the misfortune of anyone who finds themselves featured in her articles. In this memoir (which was promptly banned in China and I think remains so today, more than twenty years later), Ms. Wong directs that energy on a new topic: herself and her experiences with China.

Born and raised in Canada, Ms. Wong, as a teenager, became one of the first two foreign students allowed to enroll at Beijing University in close to a decade. She embraced the Cultural Revolution so much that she voluntarily gave up her university-sponsored domestic help to do manual labor for two months. But over a period of more than six years (initially as a student and later as a news assistant for The New York Times), she gradually became disillusioned with the Maoist movement and left China in 1980.

A graduate degree in journalism and years of working as a business reporter later, she got a job in the Globe and Mail's Beijing bureau and returned to China in 1988. Her meticulous chronicle of the Tiananmen Square massacre is the most compelling section of the book (seriously, that chapter reads like a thriller), but almost as interesting is her account of the aftermath. As one of the few foreign correspondents who chose to remain in China after Tiananmen Square, Wong traveled all over the countryside to explore various issues.

Her time during the Cultural Revolution also gives an interesting perspective to her later work, as she draws upon her experiences from that time to try and understand what was happening in China in the late 80s/early 90s (her comparison between the 1989 protests and the 1976 Tiananmen incident, which she also witnessed, is really interesting) - and uses those insights to explore where the country is heading.

By far the best book I've read this year.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodreads recommended this book after I read Jung Chang's amazing saga of her family's Chinese history in Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. Jan Wong's book is an account of her journey as a Canadian-raised daughter of Chinese descent, to a young woman who travels to China ready to embrace the Maoist ideal.

Following high school in 1972, Jan Wong was selected by the Chinese government as one of two western international students to attend Beijing University. From the outset, although she thoroughly embraced the Chinese cultural revolution, she knew she was being treated differently. She and the other "foreign" students didn't have it nearly as rough as the native students, and it wasn't long until Wong started demanding equal treatment. (After relinquishing the private chef and eating in the cafeteria with the rest of the students, Wong admits it was the first time she realized there was such a thing as terrible Chinese food!) The Chinese government obviously thought they would be able to use Wong as part of their propaganda towards the west, and for awhile they were correct. Eventually, Wong's eyes to opened to the reality of the Maoist government, and then felt stabbed in the back when she learned that her Chinese friends didn't actually believe the communist nonsense they had been spouting in front of her for years. They were just too afraid to contradict Mao's platform.

The book continues through Wong's marriage to an American who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, their subsequent repatriation to the west, and her eventual return to Beijing as a journalist. Her coverage of the Tiananmen Square Massacre was especially informative and moving.

This was an excellent memoir, filled in insight, humor and drama. I highly recommend this one!

[E · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you want to read a compelling memoir about the modern history of China, forget this trash and pick up "Life and Death in Shanghai" by Nien Cheng, or "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang. Don't waste your time with"Red China Blues."

At first glance, one might peg "Red China Blues" as a story about growth---the bildungsroman of a Chinese-Canadian girl searching for identity and her dearly beloved, the fledgling communist Chinese government. What a lovely idea!

The problem is, Jan Wong never seems to "come of age." She does not learn and grow from her experiences during the Cultural Revolution and beyond. To the contrary, she never becomes truly disillusioned with Chinese communism. She never grows up. She was---and still is---a privileged, self-important, self-righteous fool. She is haughty, arrogant, unapologetic, and, frankly, one of the most irritating personalities I've ever encountered in literature.

Wong expresses no remorse or regret for her actions as a Red Guard---betraying comrades, ruining lives, and whatnot---not even with the benefit of hindsight.

She makes some show of outrage toward the human rights violations committed by the communists during the 70s and 80s, but it comes across as token, insincere, an afterthought. It's as if her editor said to her, "This is pretty good, but you need to sound a little less crazy and a little more human."

The only worthwhile section of this book is Wong's first-hand account of the 1989 Tianamen Square Massacre, which is riveting.

[Sara G · Rating 3 out of 5]

This interesting memoir from a Canadian who was one of the first Western students at Beijing University and lived through the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests could have been better. Instead, I found it very polarizing. At first, the author as a young woman idolized Mao and his communist state. After 1989, she loathed it. There's no in between. The descriptions of the Chinese people and how life in Beijing has changed so drastically over the past few decades were amazing. The author just came off as too privileged for my tastes throughout the book.

[S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

(banned in China)

Jan Wong's memoir of her long-haul experience in China is somehow disturbing, possibly because she inhabits two categories--Chinese and Maoist--that can be disquieting. then all of a sudden the narrative accelerates Wong eye-witnesses the Tiananmen Square massacre. Wong's disillusionment thereafter flows. 4/5

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jan Wong is a Chinese-Canadian journalist who, as a starry-eyed and naive teenager, believed so strongly in the Chinese Communist experience that she found a way to become one of two foreigners admitted to Beijing University during the height of the Cultural Revolution.

In the end, Wong spent the majority of her late teens, twenties, and thirties living in "Red China." Her birds-eye view of the Cultural Revolution, of the "awakening" of Communist China under Deng Xiaoping, and, later, of the Tianamen Square riots and massacre, are absolutely fascinating. I found that particular aspect of her experience far more interesting than the books core - the author's own awakening from naive idealist to cynical realist, a journey so many of us make, no matter what it is we've been idealistic about.

I'm giving the book 3 stars rather than 4 because it is a bit too long, and her attempts late in the book to slam the Chinese government rang a little hollow to me. In particular, her undisguised disgust over how the Chinese government uses prison labor to make cheap goods made me laugh out loud, since the privatization of prisons has basically allowed the same thing to happen in the United States over the last 20-30 years. But I digress, and Wong is certainly right that the Chinese government is not shy about committing atrocities within its own borders.

A good read, but it'll take you a while to get through it.

[Rui Su · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Canadian born in China in the mid-1990's, I grew up familiar with Mao and Deng Xiao Ping, yet I had no real conception of the impacts of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the Tiananmen Massacre, or Deng's capitalistic remodel of the economy. Jan painfully writes about her own indoctrination of Mao-ism as a starry-eyed college student and subsequently, we follow her journey through Beijing University, farming rice fields, and the shift of political power in China. She records her time in excruciating detail and gives us a rare glimpse of what it was like to live in China during this turbulent and changing time. I came away angry and frustrated - by how such injustices can be in my own birth country - but also a more critical and "woke" Chinese-Canadian. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in learning more about the 70s to 90's in China.

[Kate]

What a fascinating chronicle of a young Chinese-Canadian woman, enamored of the Maoists, who emigrates to Communist China. She undergoes extreme physical and mental challenge in an effort to become a purist, to change her bourgeois ways--only to witness the country open up to Capitalism after the death of Mao. Then she begins to realize how she'd been duped/brainwashed into believing in a system that wasn't what she'd thought it was.

This book is a bit overwritten at times, but I'm glad I read it, and I appreciate the author's knowledge and insights. I'm trying to learn as much as I can about China before we head there this fall.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a life! A bit of a slog at times, but definitely worth reading for its insight into the mysteries of China during the Mao years from the unique perspective of a Chinese Canadian who chose to move there when she was still a teenager.

[Amanda R · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was excellent for so many reasons. Firstly, I know very little about China, either its history or its present situation, so this was extremely informative for me.

She spends several chapters describing the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and the events that led up to it, which was incredible. I learned about it in a world history class in about 1993, but I think we were still missing a lot of the details at that time and I don't much remember it anyway. I knew about the Tank Man, but beyond that I sort of had a vague idea that a few people had died and not much else. Obviously I was tragically wrong.

The information about how Chinese culture evolved from Maoism to where it is now was really interesting too. And honestly, having read We the Living and now this, I can't understand how anybody ever thought that communism on a national scale was a good idea.

Which leads me to my other favorite thing about that book, which was Jan Wong's evolution from fervent Maoist to moderate capitalist. She's very honest about how misguided and obnoxious she was on her first visit to China, which I really appreciate, plus it was so interesting to see how her attitude changed after having lived in China for several years. I believe that ages 19 and 20 are very significant for a lot of people. You still feel things as strongly as you did as a teenager, but you're closer to adulthood and more aware of the outside world. Those two factors combined make for some powerful convictions, which sometimes hold true and sometimes not so much. Jan Wong just experienced that on a much larger scale than many of us and I loved reading about it.

Plus, she's a wonderful writer. As a journalist, she knows how to grab the reader's attention and make things clear and concise, which is hugely helpful when I'm reading about a subject I know almost nothing about. I get the impression that she has a reputation here in Canada for being rude and hostile, but I didn't see that at all. She's forthright and honest, sure, but not hostile. I've loved both of her books that I've read so far, and I believe I'm going to have to read all the rest of them as well.

This was an impulse purchase from the Kindle store and I'm really glad I spent the money. This is a book I'll be reading again.

[Shelby Nagy · Rating 5 out of 5]

From what little I know, there's been quite a few memoirs written by survivors of totalitarian regimes. This one, however covers something even more riveting: China's transformation from Communist dictatorship to...well, a Communist dictatorship, with the addition of a free market.

Wong is a journalist through and through. As such, she is obviously fond of cliches and colloquialisms- which can be off-putting to some, but personally I didn't mind them. The first few chapters recall her years at Beijing University (as a self-described "starry-eyed Maoist"). Here she enthusiastically shovelled manure and harvested wheat on weekends, showered once every four days, and worked in mines alongside her classmates while belting out "Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman". Wong often sounds contemptuous of her former naivete, her infatuation with left-wing idealism...and it doesn't take long before the cracks start to show. For example, a brief romance with a fellow Westerner almost results in her expulsion. Friends rat each other out for being "counter-revolutionary", in the hope that they themselves will be overlooked. After a lacklustre graduation ceremony, she and her classmates are dismayed to find that their entire University education had consisted of farm work and being drilled in Mao Zedong Thought.

Having grown disillusioned with China, Wong returned to Montreal. When she came back to China once again as a reporter for the 'Globe and Mail', she bore witness to the Tiananmen Square Massacre- and to the decadence, tragedy, and signs of hope that Deng Xiapeng's new capitalist policies had ushered in.

Wong's former disgraced housekeeper is now a proud entrepeneur.
A rural village is wrought with TB, malnutrition, and mental retardation.
The local markets overflow with new imported foodstuffs...yet the once-blue skies are now choked by smog. People who had once been muzzled with fear now speak their minds without a second thought.


No matter where you stand politically, this memoir is a fun-to-read expose...not unlike Barbara Ehenreich's 'Nickel and Dimed'.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I shouldn't say this was surprisingly good, as I know Jan Wong is a very good writer, but it was surprisingly engaging. It's a unique perspective as she was one of the very few Westerners permitted into China in the 1970s. She looks back at her foolish idealistic rigidity and you sense she's saved some of her strongest distain for herself and how slowly it took her to realize that Maoism wasn't the solution to the world's greed and unfairness. She has a light touch to her writing, so that even though we read of some of the horrid conditions, she also provides levity and humour - and not in a way that diminishes the severity of the suffering of the many.

It's long and there's several parts - from her Maoist years in the 1970s to her time as a journalist during Tianamen Square Massacre - but her unique view of China (and excellent journal-writing) give the reader an excellent idea of what it would be like living in communist China. She was hopeful when she finished this book, so reading it now, I'd be curious to see what her thoughts are in 2020.

[Terri Durling · Rating 4 out of 5]

My husband and I visited China on a tour for two weeks in 2014. It was an incredible experience - rich in history and I've been interested in that history ever since. Jan Wong tells it as it was and is, having been a Canadian student studying at Beijing University during the cultural revolution. She went there enthralled with Maoism and determined to experience it to the fullest. She did just that working like a peasant doing hard labour, casting off material goods and fighting constant hunger and terror. She was a witness to the massacre at Tiananmen Square and became a correspondent reporting on China for the Globe and Mail, living there during that difficult time when she was often fearful for her life and that of her husband. She is a very accomplished writer, drawing the reader in with humour and facts that cover very difficult subject matters. Educational, informative, intriguing and compelling, she lets the reader see China at its worst and best.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the years since the book came out, I had tried a few times to read it but just couldn't finish it due to lack of interest. It wasn't until I returned from a recent trip to Beijing and other parts of China that I was able to finish the book. Wong's stories and anecdotes suddenly came alive to me because I had visited Beijing University, Tiananmen Square and other places in person.
I feel like I understand my parents' China during the Communist era more. When I recommended this book to my brother and nephew, they were like, "Why should we read about China's past? China is so different now." Oh, but we who don't know our history are doomed to repeat it, boys. I highly encourage everyone to read this book and Wong's other 2 books about China. She's funny, feisty, and an underrated journalist.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 20th century history, culture and politics of China is intriguing to me and this book offers a unique perspective. The author is a Chinese Canadian woman who went to China in 1972 as a university student and true believer of Maoism. She pictured China as it's propaganda described: Everyone was equal and everyone was happy. Slowly, she begins to see the flaws of communism in general and Maoism in particular. The book describes her journey from pro-Maoist university student in the early 1970s to a dismayed journalist in the late 1980s. I enjoyed her observations on how the Chinese Culture changed so much during such a short time.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in China, cultural comparisons, world politics or history.

[Leo McKay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure how I missed this in the 90s, since my recollection is that it was pretty widely read at the time.

Wong has one of the most unique perspectives on China to be found in a Western journalist. She studied at Beijing University during the Cultural Revolution, when she was an ardent Maoist. Then she later returned to the country as a reporter for a Canadian newspaper, and was on location reporting in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Because she lived in China as both an outsider/insider and an insider/outsider, and because of her almost jaw dropping willingness to be honest about herself and others, this book is enlightening still, and still gripping and eminently readable.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."---John Lennon. If only Jan Wong had taken these lyrics from 1968 at heart she, a Chinese young woman adopted by Canadian parents, would not have traveled to the PRC in 1972. Wong expected to encounter a place "where everyone was as happy as clams" and instead found herself trapped in a giant ant colony for the next six years. Highlights of this hilarious and also, at times, terrifying memoir include meeting "the Pyongyang panty-fetishist" and an interview with Mao's grandson---a TV addicted couch potato named "Brave New World Zedeng".

[Sydneyann Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. This book is part memoir and part Chinese history being told by a Canadian woman who was one of the first westerners allowed by China to attend university there. She attends university in the heart of the cultural revolution in the 1970s as a dedicated self proclaimed Maoist and then goes on to be a Bejing news correspondent for The Globe. Hearing her first person account of being at Tinamin Square was intense and eye opening. The author has an amazing story of how she slowly becomes disenchanted with Maoism and socialism as she learns more about the country she loves so dearly.

[Loz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book and at times it made my jaw drop. This woman leaves a cushy life in Canada and heads to communist China. Why? Well she is an idealistic fool. She eventually finds villages where the entire population is inbred with amazing disabilities, she also ends up working in a factory and sleeping on the floor of it with her comrades. An amazing tale and I guarantee that by the end of the book you will want o just slap the author to wake her up. I really liked this book.

[OrangeXenon54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing, detailed, first-hand account of Cultural Revolution China in the 70's up to and beyond the 1989 Tienanmen Square Massacre. Anyone who wants to know the true evil of China, Communism, and censorship in general need to read this book. Scarily enough, there are many parallels to what Wong describes in her accounts of the ludicrous policies of the Cultural Revolution and the current state of American higher education.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing in quiet sort of way. The book's already more than twenty years old, we now have a West vs East trade war going on, American greed facing off against Chinese greed, and I wonder what the author thinks of it all. Perhaps what I like best about the book is that it faces off but does not devalue whatever youthful idealism has been a part of one's life."I took off my Mao badge, and went home."

[Jody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating memoir. Reading it has made me realize how little I know about China. Glad I unofficially borrowed from the discard pile of the library I work in.