Soho Press - Red Flower of China by Zhai Zhenhua

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“My heart hardened and I became used to blood.”

A Red Guard’s brutally candid memoir of the Cultural Revolution

April 1994 | History/Asian Studies/Memoir
$13 Paperback
ISBN: 1-56947-009-X
Brit., trans., dram. rights: Bukowski Agency

“Compelling.... Frightening and engrossing at once, [it] documents the change of a hopeful girl excited by stories of heroes to a young woman embittered and betrayed.... The change is shocking , the story fascinating.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

Red Terror was what the Chinese called the Cultural Revolution. Zhai Zhenhua was one of its youthful zealots. Exhorted by Mao, her generation was called to rid Society of “class enemies.” “A revolution is not a dinner party,” he said. “[It] is an insurrection, an act of violence.” The author and her cadre confronted an artist, shaved his head, painted it with black ink. Mercilessly beaten, a nationally admired writer took his own life. In just one country in the month of September, 1966, 325 fatal beatings were administered. In Beijing 1,700 died in the course of 33,600 “home raids.” Author and Guard leader Zhai Zhenhua was 15.

ZHAI ZHENHUA and the Guard were themselves eventually purged, exiled to hard labor in the countryside. In 1977 the government allocated one university seat to the factory in which she then worked. In time, she won an overseas scholarship and earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering. She never returned to China. She currently lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

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