Monday, November 2, 2015

Son of the Revolution: A Review



Liang Heng’s Son of the Revolution functions on three levels: as an autobiography, as a personal history of the Cultural Revolution, and as a piece of literature. On all three levels, it succeeds. The book follows the life of the author through his childhood, teenage, and young adult years as the Cultural Revolution swirls around him, disrupting his life and destroying much of his family.

The story begins in 1958, when Liang was only four years old. At first, his life was fairly peaceful and stable; his mother and father were employed, and his grandmother and siblings were nearby. Both his parents devoted their efforts to the Communist party that had overtaken the country less than ten years prior. Soon, the Cultural Revolution began, and Liang’s life started to unravel. First, his mother was labeled an enemy of the party (and thus of the state) when she fell on the wrong side of the prevailing wind and forced to reform her thought. This slight miscalculation on the part of his mother haunted Liang for the rest of his life. After that, the label of “rightist” was often slapped onto him because of a single error made by his mother.

Liang’s father, initially hateful toward Liang’s mother because of her poor political performance also accidentally fell to her same fate, despite his incessant devotion to Chairman Mao. Due to this Liang’s young life was a constant struggle because of the ceaseless waxing and waning of various political currents. The absurdity of the never constant government policies can best be seen in an incident toward the end of the book, in which Liang’s father was sent to the country to learn from them, but on arrival was told to instruct them. Despite these upheavals, Liang’s life was far from joyless. He travelled across the country, made friends, and eventually, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, met and fell in love with an American. The two married, and she helped him pen the story of his life.

Throughout the book, we can see not only the development of the author, but also the development of the complicated and convoluted disaster that was the Cultural Revolution. While the political happenings at the top of the Politburo are unclear in the text, they were equally unclear to the millions who were effected by those changes during the 1960s. As a result, we see the events of the Cultural Revolution, not from a top-down, political point of view, but from a bottom-up lens, revealing the perspective of the common people tangled up in the torturous and continual revolution. Thus, Son of the Revolution is not just a biography of one person, it is the biography of the millions of people who suffered through the rapidly changing world of the Cultural Revolution. The writing is excellent, the storytelling superb, and the reader cannot help but become carried along in the story of Liang Heng’s life.

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