Angol
This 'gripping and poignant memoir' ("The New York Times Book Review"), a story of hardship, warmth and humour in the face of cruelty, draws us into the intersections of everyday life and Communist power from the first days of 'Liberation' in 1949 to the Tiananmen Square protests and after. The son of a professional family, Kang Zhengguo is a free spirit, drawn to literature. In Mao's China, these innocuous circumstances expose him at the age of twenty to a fierce struggle session, expulsion from university and a four-year term of hard labour in Xian's Number Two Brickyard. So begins his long stay in the prisoncamp system. He finally escapes the Chinese gulag by forfeiting his identity: at the age of twenty-eight he is adopted by an ageing bachelor in a peasant village, enabling him to start a new life. Rehabilitated after Mao's death, Kang finds himself still subject to the recurring nightmare of party authority.
