Reading "Out of Mao's Shadow"

Perhaps my favorite Chinese writer is Ha Jin, who authored Waiting and The Crazed, both thinly veiled accounts of life in China disguised as fiction. Ha Jin is a Professor of English at an American university and has won numerous awards for his writing. His unusual style, which I will not degrade as Chinglish, makes his acceptance by English readers even more remarkable. His books are not allowed in China, so I take a few copies when I travel there to be given to eager English professors who are yearning for Ha Jin's books.

I also enjoy Peter Hessler's writings on China. Peter went to China as a Peace Corp volunteer to teach English at a teacher training college near Chengdu, learned fluent Chinese, and chronicled his life, the lives of his students. and of elderly Chinese scholars both in and out of China. Probably his best book is the first, River Town, which is mainly about his life and the lives of his students, but the second, Oracle Bones, proves him to be an accomplished investigative reporter as well, able to trace leads across continents and unearth stories and discover long forgotten personalities. Peter writes to The New Yorker as well and his byline is a sure sign of an absorbing tale. I hope to read his new book Country Driving while visiting the States later this month.

A vast amount of literature in English flows out from China and from expatriate Chinese authors, and, at the most, I would merely flip thru these books at airport bookstores on the way somewhere. For Chinese New Year, I traveled to Sri Lanka, and, at the Hong Kong airport, bought Out of Mao's Shadow on a whim. I had spotted the book at various bookstores but not knowing the author and no longer trusting the back cover blurbs, hadn't even bothered to flip it open. But the chapter titles and the photos were irresistible.

The book turned out to be an unforgettable read. The author, Philip Pan, who was the Washington Post Beijing Bureau chief from 2000 to 2007, is a master story teller. He chronicles the lives of dissidents, those individuals who courageously stood up to the vast, repressive regime that is China. Philip traveled extensively to meet with and interview these people, and his accounts are detailed and meticulous. Perhaps no story touched me more than that of Lin Zhao, a stubborn, headstrong students at Peking University (Beida), who was imprisoned for decades for resisting the Ant-Rightist Campaign and other violations of the Communist Party, who wrote lengthy essays using her own blood, and who was finally executed in a Shanghai prison. My brief description does no justice to the heroic life of Lin Zhao. As I read her story in tranquil "Pondside" over the Chinese New Year holidays, I had to pause a number of times because the story was too painful and emotionally overwhelming for continuous reading. I have copied her photo below. It shows a young woman who sacrificed her affluent lifestyle for communism only to be betrayed by the party.




Lin Zhao's story is narrated through the work of Hu Jie, an independent researcher, documentary movie maker, and dissident, who spent years of his life and his savings tracking down Zhao's friends and contemporaries in order to record her story. Hu later produced Though I am Gone, the award winning movie about one of the first victims of the Cultural Revolution.


Lin Zhao

Other chapters in Out of Mao's Shadow describe a cemetery in Chengdu for victims of the Cultural Revolution; the persecution of the authors of An Investigation of China's Peasantry; the story of Jiang Yanyong, the doctor who exposed the AIDS cover-up; the tribulations of Chen Yizhong, the trailblazing former editor of the Southern Metropolis Daily, and the harassment of the the blind activist Chen Guancheng.