In this compelling biography, James R. Ross integrates interviews and contemporary history to present a vivid picture of the horrifying ordeals suffered by Wen Zengde (1900-1988), a Chinese American woman who returned to China in 1956 to teach English and was caught up in the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Charged with espionage by the Red Guards, Wen Zengde was imprisoned and tortured for ten years, but lived to tell her story. This gripping account integrates biography and contemporary history, providing a compelling picture of the ordeals suffered by the victims of that vast social upheaval.
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Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
The "tornado" that caught Wen Zengde was China's Cultural Revolution. Following her arrest by Mao's Red Guards in 1966, Wen, a San Francisco-born Chinese American language teacher, was the victim of a harrowing decade of deprivation, imprisonment, brutal interrogations, and forced labor. She courageously refused her captors' demands for a confession to espionage charges and, against the odds, survived. In 1982, during the relatively relaxed period after Mao's death, she was able to return to the United States, and it was there that journalism professor Ross met and interviewed her. Ross had spent summers teaching in China and had a good grasp of the forces that shaped that country during the grim years in which intellectuals were persecuted by marauding Red Guards. The sweep of Wen's memory adds interest to this book, which, remarkably, begins with her childhood recollections of meeting Sun Yat-sen in California in 1910. Photographs and easy, graceful writing add to the book's appeal for general readers.
John H. Boyle, California State Univ., Chico
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
John H. Boyle, California State Univ., Chico
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Ross (Journalism/Northwestern; Escape to Shanghai, not reviewed) tells the story of Wen Zangde (1900-88), whose extraordinary life mirrored the vicissitudes of 20th-century Chinese history. Wen was born to Chinese immigrant parents in San Francisco, where, as a child, she met Dr. Sun Yatsen, who was later to become president of China upon the overthrow of Manchu rule. In 1914 Wen went to college in Beijing. She remained, married, and moved in high society and government circles with her banker husband. In the early '30s, fleeing the Japanese occupation, they moved with their children to Hong Kong; after Hong Kong itself fell to the Japanese during WW II, Wen took her children back to China, where she had to deal with armed Chinese bandits and Japanese soldiers. She fled again to Hong Kong after the Nationalists were defeated by the Communists; but her admiration for Zhou Enlai (and her husband's infidelities) led her to return to Shanghai, where she taught English at the prestigious Foreign Languages Institute School. Ross devotes the second half of his book to her ten years of humiliation, imprisonment, and beatings at the hands of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Wen was accused of using nonproletarian language in her lectures (e.g., describing a woman as ``beautiful'') and of spying for her husband's Nationalist newspaper in Hong Kong. She refused to confess to being a spy and was released in 1976. Wen, who spent her final years in Oakland, Calif., emerges as a model of heroic stoicism--but she also remains somewhat distant. Ross sticks to the epic and to the historical. Readers may want to know more of her inner life, especially her feelings about her marriage, China itself, and her sufferings. Still, a solid account of one woman's remarkable physical and moral endurance. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A sort of "Everyman" of loathsome fanatics gone wild,
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This review is from: Caught In A Tornado: A Chinese American Woman Survives the Cultural Revolution (Hardcover)
This Cultural Revolution memoir is somewhat unique in that it is about an American born Chinese woman who returned to China before WWII and decided to stay after Mao came to power. She got tired of her philandering spendthrift husband, left him in Hong Kong, and decided to become an English teacher in Shanghai to be near her three grown children. Wen, Zengde was 66 years old in 1976 when the decade long Cultural Revolution started. There is another similar book also by an elderly woman, Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai, but I got board with it and didn't get past the first few chapters. Caught in a Tornado is a pretty fast read. Many Chinese committed suicide, especially the elderly who had less reason to endure the torment of the Cultural Revolution being so near the end of their lives, but Wen bravely stuck it out. She endured repeated beatings and interrogations, mostly from her students who served as the thought police, and survived. I suspect the ordeal shortened her life, however, because her sister who spent life in America lived to be at least 102. Wen passed away at 88. This book is short and provides a good overview of the sufferings and insanity that prevailed during the Cultural Revolution. Most appalling were the accounts of children turning on, and in some cases, killing parents and cannibalism in Guangxi Province; see the book Scarlet Memorial; read it on an empty stomach and keep in mind that the atrocities were mostly committed by ignorant peasants absent religious beliefs.
The parallels between Mao's China and Afghanistan under the Taliban are pretty striking. Change China to Afghanistan, Mao to Allah, Mao's red book of quotations to the Qu'ran, and the Red Guards to the Taliban. The Four Olds could be men without beards, women unveiled, music and movies, schools other than madrasas, and any book besides the Qu'ran. In both cases schools were shut down and only one subject was allowed to be studied; in Afghanistan it was the Qu'ran (the Taliban's interpretation) and in China it was Mao's book of quotations. Both the Red Guards and the Taliban were able to break into any home anytime and destroy or confiscate items deemed counter-revolutionary or un-Islamic. Those perceived as not complying with the extremists, physically or mentally, were beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes murdered. The Red Guards attacked those in western dress, especially women with "unrevolutionary" bourgeois hair styles and make up. The Taliban did the same thing to women who dared to show their hair, faces, or leave the house without a male relative escort. They also attacked men for not having foot long beards. The only difference is that membership in the Red Guards, while restricted by class background, was open to both genders.
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