Red Fire: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution - Softcover

Chao, Wei Yang

3.94

35 ratings by Goodreads

9780998196015: Red Fire: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0998196010 ISBN 13: 9780998196015

Publisher: Avant Press, 2017

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In August 1966, a 14-year-old boy in Beijing is thrust into violence and chaos as Mao Ze-dong's Cultural Revolution begins to blaze across China. In this riveting memoir, Wei Yang Chao now tells his story—how rebels attacked and publicly humiliated his family, upended his education, and sent out into a the country rendered unrecognizable by violence and radical ideology. At first he is swept up by the Red Guards but finds himself at the center of a bloody revolution. After mass rallies at Tiananmen Square, he witnesses attacks on teachers and professors, and the disintegration of his parents’ lives as tolerance and freedom begin to crumble he finds himself cast into exile. Red Fire gives readers an unprecedented account of a young survivor—a story told with real force and heartbreaking honesty.

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About the Author:

Wei (“way”) Yang Chao was born in Guangzhou (“gwahng-joh”) in southeastern China and moved with his family to Beijing in 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. In the aftermath he worked as a translator and tour guide, speaking Mandarin, Cantonese and English. In 1981 he came to America to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received both his Master's and Ph.D. degrees. He later obtained engineering training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He pursued a career in innovative business technology, and founded one of China's "Top 100" e-Business and Internet companies, serving as Chairman/CEO for sixteen years. He now lives in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Beijing, working to promote cultural understanding and exchange between China and the United States. The author of many books and articles in Chinese on the topics of technology and culture, Red Fire is his first major publication in English and tells the story of his years during the Cultural Revolution.

Review:

"Red Fire is an unforgettable historical testimony, plunging us into the most turbulent years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We travel alongside the young narrator and share his excitement, bewilderment, and rage, and by the end of the book we are forced to recognize that this is one of the greatest gifts literature can provide us: to recover a lost but living world." -Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

-Red Fire is an unforgettable historical testimony, plunging us into the most turbulent years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We travel alongside the young narrator and share his excitement, bewilderment, and rage, and by the end of the book we are forced to recognize that this is one of the greatest gifts literature can provide us: to recover a lost but living world.- -Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

"A deeply satisfying book...The arc of this engrossing journey should transport readers to China, turning them into eyewitnesses to these turbulent events." -Kirkus Reviews

"Red Fire is an unforgettable historical testimony, plunging us into the most turbulent years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We travel alongside the young narrator and share his excitement, bewilderment, and rage, and by the end of the book we are forced to recognize that this is one of the greatest gifts literature can provide us: to recover a lost but living world." --Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

"Red Fire is a deeply satisfying book...The arc of this engrossing journey should transport readers to China, turning them into eyewitnesses to these turbulent events." -Kirkus Reviews

"Red Fire deserves a place on the reading shelves of any political or social issues reader." -Midwest Book Review

"Red Fire is an unforgettable historical testimony, plunging us into the most turbulent years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We travel alongside the young narrator and share his excitement, bewilderment, and rage, and by the end of the book we are forced to recognize that this is one of the greatest gifts literature can provide us: to recover a lost but living world." --Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

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