Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China (review)

Thirty Years in a Red House joins an impressive and growing list of memoirs written since the mid-1980s by Chinese nationals born in the 1950s and now resident in the West, a list that includes Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro's Son of the Revolution, Jung Chang's Wild Swans, Gao Yuan's Born Red, Zhai Zhenhua's Red Flower of China, Anchee Min's Red Azalea, Rae Yang's Spider Eaters, and Ting-xing Ye's A Leaf in the Bitter Wind. Typically, the authors of these memoirs recall a life of relative tranquillity disrupted by the Cultural Revolution; they describe Red Guard excesses and the persecution of their families followed by years of banishment from the cities to state farms and cadre schools; then they conclude with political rehabilitation and the decision to leave China, often with the help of a Western partner. Catering to an apparently insatiable appetite in the book trade for tales of communist brutality, each reveals to a target audience unfamiliar with Chinese history the extraordinary events of the Maoist period, attempting to make as much sense as can be made of an age of paranoia, injustice, and mutual betrayal in which they and their families were victims.

A cursory look at Zhu Xiao Di's book confirms his place in the company mentioned above. The title is appropriately red, and there is a selection of photographs featuring the author's family in unsmiling group poses and the author himself, from infancy to adulthood as he returns from America to his birthplace. There is also the incorporation of the family saga into a conventional retelling of the history of the nation and the author's hometown, in this case Nanjing. Most of the authors offer much the same basic fare, each with his (or, more frequently, her) experiences and literary artistry providing the distinctive regional and personal flavor that brings the reader back for another course at the same table.

Zhu's narrative presents the predictable stories of unjustified accusation, cruelty, and humiliation. The first heady days of the Red Guard movement and the mass rallies in Tiananmen Square and the subsequent "sending down" to the countryside—staples in the writings of his slightly older contemporaries—appear here vicariously, through the experiences of the author's sister. So much is predictable; but what distinguishes this book from the others is its extraordinary degree of filial piety: the book is at heart a eulogy of the author's father Zhu Qiluan, and of the class of establishment intellectuals of which he appears as a shining example. When the author expresses his determination, common to almost all autobiographers, to "set the record straight" (p. 159), and provide his version of the past, it is principally his father's record that he seeks to elaborate.

Zhu presents his father in the most romantic terms that his age and class permit: he casts him in the image of Zhou Enlai. Not only does Zhu senior bear a physical resemblance to the founding premier of the People's Republic, he also embodies the qualities that feature in the mythology that built up around Zhou— a man of culture at home among the intelligentsia, a leader maintaining an austere lifestyle, and a public servant exhausting himself for the welfare of the nation. As if resemblance to Zhou Enlai were not enough, the author likens his father to another hero of the pre-Cultural Revolution establishment, comparing his oratory to that of Shanghai mayor and foreign minister Chen Yi. Like other members of this class, writing since their rehabilitation in the late 1970s, the author implies that if only they had been allowed to maintain control of the Chinese state, all might have been well, and the disasters he recounts would have been averted.

But the author's loyal and honest...