Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

"I wasn’t excited about reading this book at first, because I thought it would be yet another familiar account of suffering during the Cultural Revolution. And yet the book really won me over. And that’s partly because it deals with the 1950s as well as the Cultural Revolution of 1966 through 1976. Indeed it goes beyond that to the author’s subsequent journey to the United States. I think the book loses a lot when it gets past the 1980s, but the earlier parts are an amazing evocation not just of suffering but also of daily life in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. One of the things that’s special, if not unique, is that he grew up in an urban setting – the city of Xi’an – but he was then exiled to the countryside, and lived a significant part of his life in an ordinary village. So he’s someone who experienced both urban and rural China. Another thing that’s different from the other memoirs is that he wasn’t a believer in Mao’s ideology who then had the scales fall from his eyes. He presents himself as being an iconoclastic figure from childhood – the kind of person who was always doubtful of orthodoxy. So that’s refreshing as a part of the genre. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But what’s most refreshing is that while we get a lot of harrowing accounts of his time in labour camps and so on, he tells his story with continual flashes back to his childhood. Meals or conversations while he was in a jail cell, or while he was doing forced labour, trigger Proustian memories – sending him back ten or 20 years. And so we learn about his relationship to another iconoclastic figure, his Buddhist grandfather, who had collaborated with different political regimes and tried to find a way to continue living an eccentric life in different settings. He also tells you about what street food tasted like in Xi’an in the early 1950s. There are just a lot of lovely vignettes. Hah, well he misses some of the dishes of that time. The funniest thing he mentions related to food – and it’s hard to imagine anything funny related to a period of terrible famines – is that during the Great Leap Forward famine, the government got concerned about how few calories people were taking in. One thing they did was try to get people to move around less, so that they wouldn’t expend energy. So they briefly lightened up the censorship mechanisms that prevented the showing of most foreign films, and you were suddenly able to see movies that would previously have been thought of as subversive, because it was one way to get people to just sit there. This is one angle on a period of suffering that, without minimising the suffering, makes you think about it in a totally new way – and that’s what I love about an illuminating biography. That’s very true. I guess one thing we have at least, in addition to the memoirs that do get told, are works of fiction that have that evocation of the ordinary. And Yu Hua’s To Live is one of my favourites – a novella that tries to give you the sense of an ordinary life lived through these incredibly extraordinary times of revolution. I know – you got me."