Volume 39, Number 5 · March 5, 1992
Literature of the Wounded
By Jonathan Mirsky
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
by Jung Chang
Simon and Schuster, 524 pp., $25.00
Voices from the Whirlwind: An Oral History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
edited by Feng Jicai, foreword by Robert Coles
Pantheon, 252 pp., $22.00
In Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic, Bette Bao Lord's memoir of her three years in Peking as the American ambassador's wife, she recalled that 'all Chinese were in pain, and taking their pulse, reading their temperature, charting every change and finding the cure took all the effort they could muster.' I believe this illness was largely fear, so intense that it frightened some Chinese out of their wits; others simply stopped thinking. Long before the Cultural Revolution, Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans writes, 'Many people had been reduced to a state where they did not dare even to think, in case their thoughts came out involuntarily.'
Review, 5595 words
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