Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

This memoir of human resilience in the face of nightmarish power draws us into the intersections of everyday life and Communist power from the first days of "Liberation" in 1949 through the Tiananmen Square protests and after. The son of a professional family, Kang is a free spirit, drawn to literature. In Mao's China, these innocuous circumstances expose him at the age of twenty to a fierce struggle session, expulsion from university, and a four-year term of hard labor in Xi'an's Number Two Brickyard. So begins his long stay in the prison-camp system, a story of hardship and poignance, of warmth and humor in the face of cruelty. He finally escapes by forfeiting his identity: at age twenty-eight he is adopted by an aging bachelor in a peasant village, enabling him to start a new life. Rehabilitated after Mao's death, Kang finds himself still subject to the recurring nightmare of party authority.--From publisher description.The author describes how his life was shaped by communist forces in China, describing his incarceration in a labor camp, his forfeiture of his identity as a means of escape, and his rehabilitation after the death of Mao.