Ten Years of Madness: Oral Histories of China's Cultural Revolution

by Fens Jicai

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cultural Revolution and the 30th of its beginning, Feng conducted extensive interviews with 100 people who lived through that harrowing decade. In 1986, when he placed ads in Chinese newspapers calling for people's experiences, he received over 4000 responses. Those he has selected are disturbing, utterly compelling, seamlessly told and, together, constitute a many-layered and intimate picture. The interviews, which read like monologues, are prefaced by the person's age and occupation in 1966. One man, who was a 16-year-old student at the time, enjoyed destroying churches with the Red Guard, but when a classmate and an elderly man were beaten, he became a "non-participant." "I found that if you want to be a non-participant, the best thing to do is go fishing." A middle-aged housewife was not so lucky. When her husband was falsely charged with counterrevolutionary activity, they were both sentenced to No. 63, a prison camp where inmates were routinely tortured to death. She describes not just the cruelties she miraculously survived but the incidentals like the opera record, The Red Lantern, that the guards played to mask screams. Another woman, a gifted young dancer in 1966, was brainwashed into believing that her father was a "rightist." He died before she recognized the lie, and she now lives with terrible guilt. Feng includes four appendices: a chronology; key figures; an interview with the author; and several dozen short interviews to sample the widely varying attitudes towards the Cultural Revolution of those born after 1976. "What I fear most," says Feng, "is that later generations will adopt a sensationalist attitude towards the suffering of an earlier one."

(From Publishers Weekly)

Genres: History, Nonfiction, China, Cultural

290 pages, Paperback

First published February 13, 1996

Reviews

[Camelia Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cultural Revolution should be thoroughly studied as Holocaust, otherwise, it could happen again.

[Tomu Zhao · Rating 5 out of 5]

HEARTBREAKING AND BEAUTIFULLY TRANSLATED!

ANY IDIOT COLLEGE "COMMUNISTS" WHO THINK MAO WAS "NOT THAT BAD" READ THIS BOOK START TO FINISH

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories are told, translated, and organized so well that I gained a real understanding of what occurred during the Cultural Revolution with my entire sensorium. Chilling and complex. A really important read.

[Lindsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks for leaving this behind, Vince.

[Candy Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book Ten Years of Madness is a non-fiction about China during the Cultural Revolution. In this book, Feng conducted extensive interviews with people who experienced the Cultural Revolution in order to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cultural Revolution. It is an oral history which has an extremely high credibility because the information all comes from the interview with Chinese citizens. I will rate this book four stars out of five because I am a Chinese and I become pretty emotional when I am reading this book. I also enjoy the way the author categorizes each interview. Instead of putting them in random order, he either categorizes chronologically or several interviews about the same topic. I would recommend this book to people who are interested in the Chinese history, especially what happened during the Cultural Revolution. Most people are familiar with the life of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution since they are famous, while they completely have no idea what happened to the norms. In this book, the author Chi-Tsai Feng successfully introduce the life of different kinds of people during the Cultural Revolution, which gives the readers a more detailed understanding of the Cultural Revolution.

[Annie Yang-Perez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book puts everything in life into perspective. In those ten years of absolute absurdity, the most ridiculous story may actually be someone's reality. What's displayed in this book are both the lowest low and the highest high in mankind: Twisted psychology, horrendous torture methods, unimaginably awful environments led to the deepest sufferings, despair and pain of a billion-population country for a whole decade, but even so, glints of love, loyalty, integrity, honesty, mercy, conscience, and many more precious human qualities still managed to survive and thrive. In Feng's epilogue, he said he was shocked to receive a letter from a youth unable to believe all the stories had really happened until his father explained the situations back in those years to him. We need to preserve the memories of that dark period so that history will not repeat itself. We need to let more understand.

[Emily Alp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book -- if this doesn't change your perspective on life, there's little that will. It's broken up into powerful accounts of various victims lives. Really makes you think about what you have and the dreadful consequences of communism attempted by a human race not evolved enough to support it.

[camryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't finish this book because it wasn't required to read it all for my class reading :). I really enjoyed it, it presents a really eye-opening look at the events that went on during the Cultural Revolution.

[Olive · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic for anyone curious about the Cultural revolution.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very difficult read, but as an oral history of what might possibly be one of the most profoundly terrible reigns in our history, it excels at driving home the terror and despair of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. This is an incredibly important work in helping us understand modern Chinese history and unpacks a difficult subject as humanely as possible. Truly a haunting read.

[Linds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and heart breaking.