![]() ![]() ![]() It was written by a native-Chinese speaker who decided to use the writing of her memoir as her means of learning English. Red Azalea takes apart the Chinese Communist experience with much the same rigorous assurance shown by Cheng, but its approach, its style, is quite different. But now I’m going to raise Red Azalea to a level equal with it. I’d always thought Cheng's book unassailable. Wu’s mission was to expose the horrendous policy of slave labor as a means of increasing China’s foreign exchange, and his book succeeds admirably in that respect while giving us his own story of near-death starvation and political persecution. Wu’s book is very good, but it does not rise to the literary level of Cheng’s. Harry Wu's Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag starts earlier, just after the Communist victory and takeover of 1949. This memoir begins with Cheng’s victimization by the state at the onset of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in 1966. The first is Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai. I can recommend three excellent books on the late 20th-century Chinese experience. ![]()
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