Customer Reviews

Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Princeton professor Perry Link says in the Introduction that Confessions "may be the best account of daily life in Communist China that I have ever read. It stands out .. because of the extraordinary lifelike qualities of the writing and the credibility of its account .. Hundreds of writers .. have given accounts of China during Mao's years, but nearly all use an ideological lens .. This account, in contrast, is clear eyed."

As Link says, it is honest and devoid of Communist ideology, the first honest account "free of Mao" to appear out of China. The writing is superb and the characters pop out of the page. Certain scenes are anthropological in detail, such as rural peasant life, and some of the prison descriptions are, according to Link, as good as anything of its type available.

Zhengguo never sacrificed his internal integrity, which made him a nail-head that attracted the notice of the Communist hammer, usually involving literature and books: Zhengguo was jailed for three years for requesting a library copy of Doctor Zhivago. Zhengguo says the purpose in writing his memoirs: "I sought salvation through describing my trials and tribulations in writing. My purpose was not merely to complain but rather to salvage my dignity through honest revelations about myself and everyone who had interacted with me, whether friend or foe." Zhengguo has obvious faults, there are times the reader wonders how he could be so foolish and stubborn, but anyone who is a devotee of books and the literary life will find in Zhengguo inspiration for a dignified life and personal integrity.

Kang's Confessions share with Rousseau's a stunning honesty. And it is honesty that makes this autobiography so accessible to non Chinese readers, despite the alien world it describes. Kang, like Rousseau, proves that when a human being lays himself bare his voice will carry clearly across time and space.

An excellent memoir of the madness that was China's Cultural Revolution. Well-written, in-depth and even-handed. The author's description of his imprisonment for "thought crimes" is chilling.

There are many great books on life in Communist China...Wild Swans, Life and Death in Shanghai, Mandate of Heaven, Iron and Silk etc.....Confessions is a great addition to the field.

Well translated and utterly captivating and scary. A look into the horrors of life under Mao's totalitarianism.

Some guys might be put off from Life and Death in Shanghai or Wild Swans which are told from very strong female points of view....Confessions is from a males point of view...I am not saying the other books are chick books and this is a guys book...but to some who might not want to read about generations of females this is a good alternative.

Its a great book and I hope it reaches a wide group of readers.

In his highly readable memoirs Yale University Professor Kang Zhengguo almost apologizes for not having it so rough in the Chinese Communist prison where he suffered privation and humiliation for three years, from September 1968 to September 1971. He reminds us that others have had it far worse, and points us to their books. But his tale of the common ailments including constipation and hunger that he and other prisoners suffered under the tyrannical rule of Mao Zedong's all-knowing and all-powerful party apparatus might be enough anyway to bring beads of sweat to a reader's brow. And for this precocious child of Xian, Shaanxi Province, who would never stop reading or learning or thinking, the prison term imposed for ordering Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago by mail from the Moscow University Library in the "revisionist" Soviet Union was not the least of his suffering.

The Cultural Revolution rendered an already ailing China almost useless as a productive country. In a land where education and scholarship had been given almost religious importance for more than 2,000 years, questions and the people who asked them suddenly became suspect. Students took over classrooms; workers became the arbitrary, vengeful bosses. Kang Zhengguo's father always urged him to stick to the sciences as he was growing up in a middle class family in Xian - knowing instinctively and through his own suffering that books and the ideas in them could ruin a person. That's the way it was under the Communist tyrants. Yet Kang would read, and write, like his grandfather before him. Suffering was his calling.

His writing and reading cost him his place at college, alienated him from his father, landed him in prison, left him a second-class citizen for a decade and haunts him even now, he explains in Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China. He can't return to China - or won't. The last time he was there, in the enlightened year 2000, he was detained and interrogated and threatened for two days. Only his connections to Yale saved him. The Chinese citizen has no power in China, not political power anyway. Mao's death in 1976 changed little and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping brought economic prosperity for a few but at the price of everyone forgetting that they were stuck in a political quagmire. Kang Zhengguo escaped all that for the idyllic life of the bookish language teacher in New Haven, Conn. His writing got him in trouble, then provided his escape valve. His story will be especially compelling to writers and others who trade in ideas. But it will provide delightful reading for any student of China, filling in the details of the lives of ordinary people living through an extraordinary time in world history. - THOMAS BRENT ANDREWS / more reviews at http://chronicdiscontent.wordpress.com ##

Highly recommended for the reader interested in how one thoughtful young person might have survived during the madness of Mao's years. Professor Kang Zhengguo provides a well-written reaffirmation of the ultimate power of the lone individual. He, while adapting to hard circumstances, quietly strove for what was just in a time of unjustness.

A harsh, deadeningly corrupt political/economic system, seemingly designed to bring out the worst in all people, is described in powerful detail.

Worth the price just for the 12-page vivid description, midway into the book, of what the author's wife suffered through when she was growing up in utter poverty.

Maintains a rare objective look at the trials and tribulations of his life, with surprisingly scant bitterness, until just towards the very end of the book, when the author seems to stop taking it all in his stride and writes emotionally about his feelings towards the regime.

I really enjoyed this; certainly a different - almost whimsical - narrative on life during this period.

I am now reading the book Confessions and it is very interesting and well written.Kang gives you a very descriptive picture of what it was like to be in China during the cultural revolution. Very frightening! I think it also gives one some insight into the culture of China today,and why their culture seems to drive their economic growth to excede sans a sense of responsibility or morality.

So what do we know about this innocent life whose story is told across five decades? Born to city life, Zhengguo Kang is early on banished by his family to the Silent Garden of his grandparents--this to keep him from being corrupted by the "bad" kids in the neighborhood. Taking the journal his father gives him, he ensconces himself in his grandfather's library and begins his self-education, each night writing about his thoughts. Is all this foreshadow of what is to come? We never learn what is in the journals. Is it only because they are burned, or because he doesn't want to reveal himself? Does this early experience foster his emotional isolation and create the hiding place necessary for his survival?

His narrative tells the brief stories of many ordinary people who are impacted by the harshness of the regime. Each story of struggle and loss is told with dispassion. His own trying experiences read like the routine of brushing one's teeth. Is he incapable of connecting with his feelings, or is he the ultimate observer? Is this book the confession of a professional confessor--who tells what needs to be said to get off, but has mastered the art of not revealing himself at all? Is it the confession of a culture that had lost its ability to feel? We'll never know for sure.

this would be a more profound work if the author had shown an insight into the quandary faced by all those in this totalitarian society. It is unsympathetic in its portrayal excepting the personal history of the author.