Son of the Revolution

This book often gets assigned as a college-level textbook for History courses, and it's easy to see why. Liang Heng literally experienced almost everything about the cultural revolution first hand. In the course of the book, he lives both sides of almost any set of events you can think of. For example, as a young boy he's involved in a revolutionary group that's excitedly denouncing capitalist influences at its school. In a fit of enthusiasm, he draws a scathing poster of a favorite teacher. Almost immediately he feels tremendously guilty over the drawing. His father and he talk about the teacher's reaction, and Liang Heng goes to apologize. Then, just when the teacher's benevolence and the father's wisdom seem to have smoothed over this pang of overzealousness in the student, Liang Heng discovers that his father, too, has been denounced in a poster, and that he himself has been shut out of his revolutionary group -- as the son of an intellectual. Within a single day he's gone from revolutionary youth to excluded son of a reactionary. He goes home that night to find his sisters threatening to move away to live at school, so as to distance themselves from his supposedly traitorous father. His father sits whispering, almost to himself, that the children should sincerely believe in the party and Mao, and that things will turn out right if they do so.

This book is filled with tumultuous turns like that. Just when you've seen the sharp edge of one dilemma, it changes shape and presents another side. Throughout all those twists, Liang Heng keeps a sympathy for those around him that brings you through the book. He can understand why people caught in these events acted like they did, and he doesn't seem to really hate anyone for it despite all he's been through. His father and mother, who divorced early during the revolution because of his mother's political background, become very different objects of sympathy, but neither one is regarded with disdain. (His father, in particular, becomes the sort of quietly tragic figure you'd find in some sprawling Russian historical novel.)

Other English language memoirs from these years in China don't approach the startling emotional clarity of this book. Life and Death in Shanghai, in particular, comes across as both shallower and more bitter. Son of the Revolution tells the entire story, first hand, with a sort of forgiveness, a sort of understanding, that I haven't forgotten in the six years since I first read it.

This is worth a rare (for me) five stars.


A harrowing adventure of growing up in China 1954-80   April 18, 2005
Chris (Washington state, USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

This book, by Liang Heng, apparently co-written by his wife Miss Shapiro, is a very quick read, one of those books with a well-flowing style to its prose and simplicity and power of its description. You don't want to put it down.

It is a story of how Liang Heng grew up as his family was torn apart by the ever changing and eratic policies enforce by the state of which Chariman Mao sat at the helm. He was probably about five when his mother was branded a rightist devationist. She had been encouraged to make criticisms of the party during the "Let one hundred flowers bloom" campaign and after honestly thinking it over, decided to criticize her bosses at the local police department for elitism and abuse of power. Of course, the Hundred Flowers campaign was eventually transformed into a rectification campaign. His mother was sent to the countryside,eventually being able to return once a month home to see her children and face the frenzied abuse of her husband, a very indocrinated, humorless, pious party member and journalist at the local state run paper. Liang's father for political safety eventaully got a new wife who, like the father, also had questionable associations and links with the old KMT regime. This new wife was posted as a school teacher in a far away city and due to bureaucratic restrictions on movement, they could not see each other for many years.

The most vivid parts of the book deal with the cultural revolution. Liang Feng as a zealous primary school student, initially lifted himself up at the beginning of this time by making cartoons of his teachers accusing them of being capitalist roader,bourgeois counterrevolutionaries, etc. But soon, his father got caught up in the trap because he was an intellectual, had briefly been part of a KMT group during the dark days of Chiang Kai Shek and the rapacious landlords before he was exposed to Maoism, and so on. Liang was branded a "stinking intellectual's son" and shunned and sometimes physically abused by his peers. His father was forced to go through many "struggle sessions" and paraded around town in a dunce cap.

The Cultural Revolution years are indeed described with the most simple and powerful indepth vivideness. The Cultural revolution for Liang had many harrowing adventures including his participation in mock long march and a stay in Peking to be part of a Red Guard group at a Musical conservatory during which period Liang caught a glimpse of Chairman Mao. Another episode deals with the armed combat of the rival "conservative" and "rebel" Red Guard groups and all sorts of splinter groups fighting for control of the city of Changsa, Liang's home town. Liang Heng gets caught in the middle of one battle and witnesses horrible death and destruction. He eventually joined a street gang made up of children of counterrevolutionaries and of communist china's lowest class, what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat. He spent some time being a cart pusher and custodian of a pig pen on a train,under the mentorship of the wise old migrant worker and street person Pockmarked Liu.

The climax of the book's vividness is probably when Liang Heng's father is transfered to the countryside for hard labor in a peasant commune. The particular commune where they are sent is in a very neglected area and the peasants very benighted. Liang's dad is assigned the duty of teaching Chairman Mao thought sessions to the peasants. Liang and his father are forced to live with a peasant and his wife, who have serious difficulty accomodating them. Unfortunately, Peking had launched another mass movement this time about elminating capitalist practices, and so the local leadership used the opportunity to harrass the peasants. The state gave this particular commune, in contrast to other areas, not much resources, and the peasants could only survive by raising revenue by selling produce from their livestock which was now being confiscated. During this episode, there are such notable incidents as Guo La Da' and the confiscation of his ducks. (...) The peasants in this commune seemed to be able to be more independent, beyond the reach of indoctrination if only because the government couldn't quite afford to put its tentacles into their remote area. Another incident deals with the hard suffering of Guo Lucky Wealth's wife, the wife of the peasant household they stayed in. She wanted to get pregnant but she had been manipulated into getting a birth control device put inside her. Guo Lucky Wealth's wife enlisted the services of a local witch doctor to make her fertile, but the witch doctor couldn't get quite the right potions.

After this point, the story loses some of its vividity as the events in his life are told more briefly. But it still is very interesting. By the early 70's, Liang Heng started to get some breaks, including being assigned a decent job at a factory to while he played for the factory's basketball team. He admits that though living standards on the whole improved(only slightly for all too many he claims) in China from the dark days of the KMT, he began to fully grasp that the cruelty, stratification and corruption in the economy and government in his society was quite different from the propaganda conception of what socialism was supposed to be. He tried to pursue girlfriends but his unfortunate political status ruined those relationship. Then he managed to get bribe his factory party officials and others to help him get accepted into college. This was after the lunacies of the Cultural revolution had died down and colleges were reoopened for competitive examination after the "Gang of Four" and their followers were purgedd after Mao's death. He eventually met Miss Shapiro who was working as a foreign language teacher at his college and fell in love with her. After college, his first postition was that of a school teacher and was dissapointed that though the post-Mao era was seemingly enacting great changes, the students he taught still exhibited the same inability to think critically that his generation had. The students still had alot of their time devoted to blindly memorizing the same silly Party slogans and being trained to worship the state, as Liang did as a youngster.


Monumental Book   September 14, 2003
D. S. Sim (Tennessee)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I have read many books concerning people whose lives were destroyed by the Cultural Revolution in China, but none can compare to "Son of the Revolution." Liang Heng paints a very vivid and clear picture of life from an enthusiastic Mao Youth to a cynical, knowledge-starved young man. If there is any book out there that records the folly of both the Cultural Revolution and Communism in general, it would be this masterpiece.
I have read this book many times, and each time I go over it I discover something new. If you are truly interested in a first-hand account of the brutality of the Communist Chinese regime or is in interested in a great read, you must get this book.


Accurate, personal account of modern Chinese history   February 20, 2006
Klovare (Columbus, OH)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Liang Heng's memoir accounts his experiences living in the second half of the 20th century. This book belongs in the category of "Wound Literature," books written post-1976 about the Cultural Revolution. While an enormous body of Wound Literature exists, Liang's is unique for the Western reader because it represents the perspective of a man. The book is a quick read and it does a good job of critically examining history but leaves out polemic politics.


Among the best of Cultural Revolution survival memoirs.   October 26, 1999
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

The struggle of Liang Heng and his family to endure and survive the insanity of the Cultural Revolution makes for a gripping read. This was one of the first books I read on Maoist China and it remains one of the best.