it takes me several days to go through the book, "wild swans", not too many chinese readers know about it, neither did I, until I found it from a public library. the author's name is zhang rong. she was the daughter of a high rank official at that time. it is a good book, but I don't have too much time to read it in detail.
摘录几个精彩的描述.
表明了她的外公的仁慈. 她外公是老中医. 好的医生都是菩萨心肠的.
1. Dr.Xia had got on very well with everybody. including my father. the two man would talk together for hours. they shared many ethical values, bjut whereas my father's were dressed in the garb of an ideology, Dr.Xia's rested on a humanitarian foundation. once dr.xia said to my father:" I think the communists have done many good things, but you have killed too many people. people should not have been kill." "like who?" my father asked. "those masters in the society of reason."....
讲述百花齐放的背景.
2.in this talk, Mao said the rightists had gone on a rampage attacking the communist party and china's socialist system. he said these rightists made up between 1 to 10 percent of all intellectuals-and that must be smashed. make it simple, 5%. to meet it, my mother was expected to find over hundred rightest to the organization under her....enticing the snake out of its haunt in order to cut off its head
讲述发动文革的背景.
3.Mao's vague battle calls threw the population and the majority of party officials into profound confusion. few knew what he was driving at. or who exactly were the enemies this time. my father and mother, like other senior party people, could see that mao had decide to punish some officials. but they had no idea who these would be. it could well be themselves. apprehension and bewilderment overwhelmed them.
讲述她父亲的正直和勇敢.(批斗大会上)
4.As the hysterical crowd screamed that he was anti-cultural revolution, he shouted angrily, "what kind of cultural revolution is this? there is nothing 'cultural' about it! there is only brutality!"
他父亲被逼疯了.
5.I went back to see my father. the apartment was in a dreadful state: the windows were broken, and therewere bits of burned furniture and clothing all over the floor. my father seemed indifferent to whether i was there or not; he just paced incessantly around and around. at night i lockeded my bedroom door, ....
描写她自己的军训. 透露出女性特有的天真.
6.our second test was shooting..... when my name was called and i lay on the ground, gazing at the target through the gunsight, i saw complete blackness. no target, no ground, nothing. i was trembling so much my whold body felt powerless. the order to fire sounded faint, as though it was floating from a great distance through clouds.
毕业实习. 也很有趣, 表现当时那男女间单纯的社会风气.
6. when the black sailors arrived, our teachers gently warned the women students to watch out:"they are less developed and haven't learned to control their instincts, so they are given to displaying their feelings whenever they like: touching, embracing, even kissing." ......one woman in the last group had burst out screaming in the middle of a conversation when a gambian sailor had tried to hug her. she thought she was going to be raped, in middle of the crowd...
出国前的准备. 让我看得几乎流泪.
7.the news that i was to go to britain reached me through excited friends in the department before the authorities told me. people who barely knew me felt hugely pleased for me, and i received manyletters and telegrams of congratulations. celebration parties were thrown, and many tear of joy were shed.....
first i had to go to beijing for a spcial training course for people going abroad. followed by a month traveling around china. the point was to impress us with the beauty of the motherland so we would not contemplate defecting...and we were given a clothing allowance. we had to look smart for the foreigners. 作者: hbv30year 时间: 2012-9-16 10:40
在看评论的时候, 发现还有一本书很受好评, 就是"Life and death in shanghai", written by Nien Cheng. I have seen the chinese version(part of) before, so I think, why not see the english version too.
It is really a good book. The author has better english skill than the previous one(wild swans). But it is also too long, I see it in 3 days and have to return it.
<上海生与死>的作者写的比较深刻, 或者说, 对文革的痛恨比前个作者更深. 前个作者她出生高干子弟, 受了共产党的苦, 但也得到过好处. 她的父亲虽然被逼死了, 但那是积劳成疾, 不算直接的被害. 她还有很多亲戚在中国, 投鼠忌器, 说话不会太绝.
NIEN CHENG就不同了, 老公女儿都死了, 亲戚在美国, 她就写得严厉些. 当然, 两本都是禁书. 我觉得应该放开, 因为这是人类社会的极大灾难, 我们要好好学习反省, 避免再次发生. 不要以为不可能, 重庆模式, 西安和青岛的砸车, 就有点苗头.作者: hbv30year 时间: 2012-9-29 12:17
我觉得life and death, the best part is the end.
....in spite of all that had happened, i was sad to leave china never return. all chinese have this feeling of attachment to our native country. ...
(我也有点担心)
A light rain was falling by the time we reached the wharf. in spite of comrade ho's official pass, the ladies were not allowed to go into the waiting room for passengers. i said goodbye to them in the rain and they returned to the bus. they wished me a pleasant trip and a happy reunion with my sisters, but none of them mentioned anything about my coming back. I think they knew that i was unlikely to return to the city which held for me such tragic memories.
the ship had lifted anchor and was sailing upstream in order to turn around. through the misty curtain of rain, i caught a glimpse of the shell building and the window of my old office.already the past was assuming an unreal dreamlike quality. the ship was gathering speed, sailing down the remaining stretch of the huang-pu river. when we reached the yangtze estuary, the storm was over and rays of sunshine were filtering through the thinning cloud.
many times in my life i had sailed from shanghai to go abroad, standing just as i did now on the deck of a ship. with the wind whipping my hair while i watched the coastline of china receding. brough meiping back from hongkong in april 1949, in response to my husband's request,. the shocking tragedy of her death, i believed, was a direct consequence of our fatal decision to stay in our own country at that crucial moment of history. therefore i felt guilty for being the one who was alive. i wished it was meiping standing on the deck of this ship, going away to make a new life for herself. .....god knows how hard i had tried to remain true to my country, but i had failed utterly through no fault of my own....
What makes you think religion will be different to democracy? The inherent intent of both religion and democracy is good, but their practice in real life is completely corrupted. Just look at Canada (and many other countries too), those rich and powerful who are corrupted and rotten are the same ones who loudly proclaim to be pro-democracy and pro-religion. 作者: hbv30year 时间: 2013-1-27 20:30
hi, Stephen, you make progress in Chinese, don't you? I introduce 2 websites for you so you can know more about the situation about China.
1. www.sina.com.cn
2. www.tianya.cn
Thanks, actually I learn a lot about China from here. I know things are rotten in China too - those who are supposed to uphold the ideal of communism (with or without Chinese characteristics) are just as hypocritical as those who are supposed to uphold religion or democracy. 作者: hbv30year 时间: 2013-1-28 09:03
not easy to be real in china. 20 years ago, to be real means to be killed.
but i believe you can be the real communist in china. since you have no religion and hate America, it is a perfect match.作者: hbv30year 时间: 2013-3-20 08:33
So it was little surprise that when Ping Fu published her memoirs last year, the searing account of how she was seized from her family at eight, gang-raped at 10 and then forced into exile after investigating infanticide of baby girls was acclaimed by critics and readers.
But Miss Fu is now the target of a vitriolic and sustained onslaught from Chinese Internet users who are accusing her of invention and exaggeration in Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds — its title drawn from a proverb about the resilience of bamboo in buffeting winds.
At a time when American news organisations, the internet giant Google and even US government agencies suspect they have been targeted by Chinese computer hackers, Miss Fu has found herself on the vituperative frontline of cyber hostilities between China and the West.
“I am living the title of the book,” the chief executive of Geomagic, a 3-D imaging technology business, told The Sunday Telegraph in an often-tearful interview.
“I was shell-shocked when the attacks started. I felt I was right back to being the eight-year-old without a voice in a denunciation session, being forced to face public humiliation, being called all sorts of names.
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“But however hurt and sad I am, I realise that I am not eight, I am not in China and that I am speaking out for all those little girls who are abused and still don’t have a voice.”
Not the first memoirist to be challenged about the accuracy of a narrative, Miss Fu, 54, a divorced mother of a teenage daughter, has acknowledged some mistakes over dates and one incident she recounted in a media interview. “But I am not writing a history book, I am telling my story and this my life and what shaped it,” she said.
Indeed, some China-watchers believe that she is the subject of a co-ordinated campaign to discredit her by nationalist online activists who have taken her story as a sleight on an entire nation.
The attacks are intense. The sales website Amazon has been flooded by one-star reviews (the lowest possible) for her book; some critics have accused her of falsifying her story to win residency illegally in the US; her Wikipedia page entry has been hacked; and insulting emails were sent to a potential business partner.
Most hurtful were accusations she had invented a gang rape when she was a child by critics who insisted that such attacks do not happen in China.
“I was being the victimised as the ‘broken shoe’ again,” she said, referring to a term of abuse often used for prostitutes that was applied to her by a particular tormenter in the wake of the brutal sexual assault.
“Who are they to tell me this never happened, that these things don’t happen in China? I have the scars. I know what was done to me.”
The broadsides began after a Forbes magazine interview with Miss Fu suffered some “lost in translation” interpretations when it appeared in Chinese, she said, most notably, that she wrote about children in labour camps — something that does not appear in her book.
But Zhouzi Fang, an influential Chinese blogger and campaigner against alleged academic fraud, then began trawling through her book and previous interviews and identified what he said were a series of discrepancies and fabrications.
Notably, he seized on a radio interview in 2010, the year in which Miss Fu’s profile in America reached new heights after she was invited as a guest by First Lady Michelle Obama to attend the president’s state of the union speech.
In that interview, she described witnessing a public quartering during the Cultural Revolution by horsemen dragging their victim apart in four directions. Mr Fang noted that there had been no other claims of such executions being conducted in China.
Miss Fu now says that she believes that as a young child, she had confused tales told to her of barbarity in old China with the brutality she witnessed and experienced after the Cultural Revolution was unleashed by Mao’s Red Guards in 1966.
But Mr Fang and his online followers have also scorned the plausibility of Miss Fu’s account of how she came to move to America penniless in 1984.
As a child, she said, her father, a university professor, and her mother, an accountant, were sent to the countryside for “re-education”, leaving her to care for herself, raise her younger sister and spend eight years working in a factory.
She then describes how she was forced apart from her family a second time when she was forced out by the regime as punishment for writing a college paper, during what she had thought was a time of post-Mao liberalisation, about the one-child policy which effectively led to girl infanticide in rural areas where some parents killed their first-borns if they were not boys.
Miss Fu said he was arrested on campus, bundled into the back of a police car with a black bag over her head, and later told she must leave the country without making a fuss. The essay, she said she later discovered, was passed by tutor to a Chinese newspaper which wrote an editorial calling for greater gender equality on the basis of its contents.
Amid all the controversy and casting of doubt, the reality of course is that this era in China was one where public records are minimal. But not even her fiercest critics can dispute her stellar academic and professional career since she arrived in the US aged 26 in 1984 for a college course arranged through family connections.
After working for Bell Labs and at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications, she and her then husband set up Geomagic in 1997. She was named by Inc magazine in 2005 as its entrepreneur of the year and she joined the National Advisory Council on innovation and entrepreneurship in 2010.
So successful was this career that Miss Fu as initially commissioned to write a business book, but she said that when she started on the project, she realised that she could not describe how she makes decisions now without explaining the importance of her past on her life.
Adrian Zackheim, the head of Portfolio Penguin, the book’s publisher, told The Sunday Telegraph that the company was standing whole-heartedly by Miss Fu and her memoir.
“It is a wonderful book and she is an admirable person and I am very proud to be her publisher,” he said. “This is a memoir, it is her story, it is not investigative journalism.
“Memoirs are often least reliable when they cover the early years of childhood, but I have no doubt of its overall credibility.”
For Miss Fu, there is no little irony that she has exposed herself to these tirades after writing a story that even her own mother wished she had left untold. “Gang-rape is still a taboo in China,” she said. “I am a single mother and my mother said to me: ‘Don’t you want to marry again? Why do you need to tell this?’”
But Miss Fu said she had no regrets that she had chosen to tell her story. “In the end, I wanted to show how love, compassion and generosity can lead to a better life.
“This is not an attack on China. Just as a mass shooting does not define America, my history does not define China.
“I’m human, not perfect, if I mixed up some dates, I will correct them. I would appreciate instructive feedback, but this is not that.
“You don’t have to believe me or like it or read it. But this is my story, my life, and who are these people to bully me while they hide behind the Internet?”
