Born Red : A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution

416 Pages·20.676 MB·English

by  Gao Yuan.

BORN RED

BORN RED
A Chronicle of
the Cultural Revolution
GAO YUAN
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© I987 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States of America
Last figure below indicates year of this printing:
16 15 14 13 12
elP data appear at the end of the book
To my son Nathaniel Taihang Gao,
with the hope that
his generation will be wiser than mine

Contents
Foreword by William A. Joseph
IX
Preface xxxi
The Hold of History I
Learning to Be Red and Expert 12
The Thirty-Six Stratagems 30
Hidden Messages 39
Ox Ghosts and Snake Spirits 50
Winds and Waves 60
The Degenerate and the Worn Shoe 67
The Red, the Black, and the In-Between 76
Smashing the Four Olds 85
Cleaning Our Own Nest 95
Picking Up the Pieces 99
Rebels and Royalists 102
Going to See the Great Helmsman II2
Sending Off the Monsters 124
Defending the Mountain Devil 126
The Carpenter-Spy 132
Reply from a Socialist-Roader 138
On the Road 14 3
Rocks Down the Well
154
A Long March, by Hook or Crook 160
Spring Festival Visitors 173
The Capless Official 183
Contents
VII
Smears and Skirmishes 187
Spring Buds 194
Arrival of the Cadets 200
The Grand Alliance 206
Uncommon Laughter 216
Victory Fish 223
The First Martyr 233
Summons by Subterfuge 243
Storming the Enemy Stronghold 248
Spies in the Marketplace 253
Family Skeletons 258
Playing with Fire 261
The Obstinacy of Truth 265
On the Run 270
From Victors to Vanquished 282
Living in Limbo 291
Class Brothers Take Revenge 296
The Radiance of the Setting Sun 305
Three Loyalties and Four Boundless Loves 3 5
I
Hostage for a Hobby 324
The Twelve-Force Typhoon 330
The Irretrievable Past 341
The Way Out 349
Postscript 355
APPENDIXES
A: Biographical Notes 365
B: Glossary 370
Contents
Vlll
Foreword
G
ao Yuan's chronicle takes us through the first violent years
of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Like
Anne Frank's diary of the Holocaust closing in around her or
the story of Dith Pran's journey through the killing fields of
Cambodia, it offers a voice that speaks to us of the human
anguish of inhuman events.
The immediacy of Gao's account of his experiences as a
Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution brings us as close as
we are likely to get to the political vortex that turned millions
of teenagers into the agents of national madness. His descrip
tion of how the movement gripped him and his schoolmates
reveals, as no scholarly analysis can, the fury that brought
China to the brink of civil war. Through his eyes we see how
ideological expletives gave way to deadly explosives as the
weapons of revolutionary conflict. His witness to the un
speakable violence that the young rebels inflicted on one an
other and their teachers evokes images of the children run
amok in Lord of the Flies. The graphic depictions of brutali
ties committed in the name of idealism may at times shock
us-yet they are also needed reminders that noble rhetoric
can often be a mask for ignoble deeds.
But Born Red is so much more than the recollection of a
political nightmare. It is a deeply personal narrative of an ad
olescent torn by conflicting loyalties as he is called upon to
join in the destruction of the world that has nurtured him.
Foreword
IX