Author Wei Yang Chao was a witness to an epic revolution. His memoir Red Fire, Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, published in April, has climbed to the top of the Amazon Best Sellers List in history and biography sections, drawing readers into events that displaced millions in China. Red Fire is a reflection of youth in a time of stunning chaos, a rare and timely story, told with real force and heartbreaking honesty.
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.
Red Fire
Author: Wei Yang Chao, Jasmin Darznik (Editor)
Print Length: 336 pages
Publisher: Avant Publisher; 1 edition (April 27, 2017)
ASIN: B071HBGV23
ISBN: 0998196010
Red Fire Summary
On August 18, 1966, Chao was a teen in Beijing, standing in Tiananmen Square watching millions of Red Guards gathered before Mao Zedong, who urged them to denounce enemies of progress. This sparked a decade of violence and social disorder, as the Cultural Revolution blazed across China.
Red Fire is an unprecedented and intimate account told by Chao’s keen-eyed younger self. He struggles to make sense of turmoil, asking questions still important in 2017. How do children cope in revolution? How do people surrender themselves to ideological frenzy? How does one break free? He witnesses the disintegration of his parents’ lives as tolerance and freedom crumble and he is exiled to work on cooperative farms. Chao tells a riveting story: how rebels attacked and publicly humiliated his family, upended his education, and how he endured cruelty and hardship in an unrecognizable China. Red Fire is more than a memoir of survival. Chao offers a story of resilience and hope through his insight as a grown man looking back half a century, to understand that turbulent era.
Red Fire Reviews
“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 shelf of any political or social issues reader.”—Midwest Book Review