Volume 34, Number 12 · July 16, 1987
Surviving the Hurricane
By Judith Shapiro
Life and Death in Shanghai
by Nien Cheng
Grove Press, 547 pp., $19.95
At a time when the new freedoms of the post-Mao years are in jeopardy, many issues of intense concern to Chinese can freely be discussed only abroad. Of these, among the most important is the Cultural Revolution, about which Nien Cheng has written one of the best books yet to appear. Life and Death in Shanghai is a clearsighted and moving account by a cosmopolitan Shanghai woman now in her seventies who left China in 1980 and has since lived in Washington. It is a very different tale from those of former Red Guards, who were hardly more than children during the upheaval and were groping to find coherence in a world in which families and public institutions had been shattered.
Review, 4209 words
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