Thank you to NetGalley and Avant Press for this reader's copy. In exchange, I am providing an honest review.
(Note: I do not rate memoirs but because NetGalley requires a rating I have attached one to this review.)

"....the most precious things - including independent thinking and our rich cultural history - would be the first to be destroyed."

In August 1966, 14-year-old Wei Yang Chao attended a mass rally in Tiananmen Square as the Cultural Revolution was ramping up. At first, Chao was all in on the things Chairman Mao was saying and doing but over time, as he witnessed more and more violence and hypocrisy he became disillusioned with this so-called revolution. The final straw was when his parents, quiet and subtle, were beaten and accused of crimes against the Chairman just for being in the professions they were in. The family was then forced to split up and go work as peasants so that they would be able to understand fully what the revolution was about.

Wow. I learned A LOT through this memoir. I had no idea, really, what Chairman Mao and his reign of terror meant within China. I had no idea what the so-called Cultural Revolution meant and what its ramifications were. And to read about it, and learn more about it, from someone who lived it was really interesting and sobering. Memoirs like this should be heeded and serve as cautionary tales.

The Cultural Revolution was a horrible ten year assault on the four olds, that masqueraded as a huge power play by Mao. So many people were ruthlessly slaughtered, imprisoned, and maligned, due to ,ass indoctrination. Chao’s story is one that should be carefully read since simian powers exist today.

This was an interesting follow up for me, after reading "Wolf Totem."

Seeing this true story of a family battered before the children were sent to the countryside for re-education puts the tale of "Wolf Totem" in a totally new frame for me.

Recommended for those who want to know what happened IN China before Nixon went to meet Chairman Mao.

I wasn't sure what to expect of Red Fire by Wei Yang Chao. However, I started to read it as I like books about chinese culture etc. However, I found this book very touching but hard to read and get into but I carried on reading it instalments.
This book would be an excellent book for schools to learn about cultures and how other people live in another country Especially as its from the eyes of a 14 year old boy who lived in Beijing and found himself in the middle of the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution.
This is a strong book and is written from the eyes of a child, Wei Yang Chao tells an amazing story of how he survived this Cultural Revolution back in August 1966.

Big Thank you to NetGalley and Avant Press, and especially the author Wei Yang Chao for letting me read it and exchange for my honest review

In view of the terrible and heart-breaking events related here, I felt curiously disengaged form the author’s experiences. It may be that I have just read too many memoirs of the Cultural Revolution and this one added little to my knowledge and understanding. The author writes openly and honestly, but I found his style a little dry at times. A welcome addition, however, to the literature of this dreadful era in Chinese history.

very good account of a period of China's history that has previously been unknown to many

This is an often not talked about story of an area outside of the United States that is incredibly important in the goal to broaden the worldview of students.

Such a horrible way to have had to live life and to watch people that you know getting murdered. The book was very dry and confusing and sometimes you felt like the author was distancing himself from the writing, which is understandable based on what this family went through. I struggled to get through this book. It is a good book if you like history and can get through a dry book.

While the American Revolution is central to the Fourth of July, America also seemed to encounter a revolutionary temperament in 1968. We weren't alone; revolution also seemed to be in the air in Europe. Even the counterculture symbol The Beatles would record their first politically explicit song, "Revolution." Yet you've got to wonder how much support there is for your revolution when John Lennon writes, "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow."

Lennon's attitude may have changed later but there's little doubt the excesses of China's then two-year-old Cultural Revolution were disturbing many worldwide. Although the violence eventually receded, the Cultural Revolution -- in reality prompted by an internecine power struggle -- wouldn't really end until after Mao's death in 1976.

The extent of the damage caused China is incalculable. We've gained insight into the Cultural Revolution's economic, cultural and personal costs as, over the years, memoirs of those caught up in it have become almost a genre unto themselves. One of the most recent is Wei Yang Chao's Red Fire: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Like many of its predecessors, such as Red-Color News Soldier and Red Scarf Girl, it makes for compelling -- and stupefying -- reading.

Chao and his family moved Beijing in 1965. When the Cultural Revolution was declared the following year, he was 13. Perhaps because of that the first several chapters of Red Fire provide as much a historical perspective as a personal one. Yet Chao would witness several significant events in the transformation of the Chinese political and social landscape that year.

Among other things, he details going to see the first big-character poster. This and other posters were huge sheets of paper with revolutionary slogans that were posted in public places. The first appeared at Peking University in late May 1966. They were a method of debate dominated by what would become the Red Guard. As "an ocean" of posters saturated the country and attacked not only ideas but individuals, the Red Guard began physically attacking those they viewed as "revisionists," i.e., older generations. Public humiliation and beatings became common as the posters achieved a status where, Chao says, "they could end a career, if not a life."

On August 18, 1966, a 14-year-old Chao was among the nearly one million college and high school students who crammed into Tienanmen Square for a rally called by Mao for the "Proletariat Cultural Revolution." Red Fire reviews the rally, at which Mao endorsed the Red Guards. In so doing he essentially released millions of zealots intent on destroying what would later be called "the Four Olds": old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas.

Chao recalls tears streaming down his face and feeling ecstatic when he saw Mao after he waded into Tiananmen Square's massive crowds. He attributes those feelings and the students' fervor to the Chinese education system, which he says "fashioned China’s youth into die-hard revolutionaries.

The education we received in those years left no room for us to question what we were learning. None. Your only option was to ingest what you were given and to believe everything you were told. Anything short of total credulity marked you as being against the revolutionary cause."

Violence erupted throughout the country. Chao admits joining in on the Red Guard's chants, slogans and rituals. He also attended "struggle sessions" in which teachers and others were severely beaten, some fatally. He claims he "looked away" at the the latter and drew a line at personal violence and destruction. Yet in 1968 he would personally experience what the Red Guard was doing.

Two immutable things brought the Cultural Revolution to Chao's front door. His father, a journalist, had attended college and graduate school in the U.S. That, of course, made him a spy. His mother came from a landowning family and landowners were one of the Red Guard's "black five categories." In April 1968, his parents were subjected to a public struggle session in their own home. Chao and his sister were forced to watch as their parents were beaten and humiliated. Within a year, Chao's parents and sister were sent into the countryside for "re-education." He, meanwhile, would be sent to do farm work in a different village, where he shared a cave residence with another man.

The personal stories allow Red Fire to portray the human effects of the Cultural Revolution. This is also true when he talks of going to historic sites he loved and seeing the destruction wrought by the Red Guards' attack on their own history and culture. Chao's detailing of the birth and initial development of the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution, though, seems held at more of a distance. Moreover, the story largely stops after we learn of Chao and his family returning to Beijing. Thus, readers get no perspective on how they and their nation mended the wounds and how long it may have taken. Likewise, there's no discussion of any ramifications of the Cultural Revolution on 21st century China. Despite that, this is a lucid account of a family and country caught in the throes of revolutionary fervor.

This was a book I read quickly - I couldn't put it down. The author's story of growing up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution grants readers a personal view from inside the storm. Too often large cultural movements are told from a distant perspective, full of statistics and devoid of humanity. This is a great addition to a reading list for anyone interested in modern Chinese history.

As others have stated, the writing style is a little basic. Compared to the horror conveyed by a book like The Aquariums of Pyongyang, Red Fire is comparably a middle school introduction to the horrors of humanity. Overall, though, a good, enjoyable book.

Copy provided by NetGalley and ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Ever wondered what it would be like to be a witness to history, to watch these watershed moments take place in front of your eyes? From what I’ve read, the answer is – terrifying. Wei Yang Chao was a witness to one of the biggest revolutions in history, especially if you go by the sheer number of people involved. He attended one rally that included over a million people, and the prospect of violence at every turn. He was lucky to survive.

This book is a first-hand account of the Cultural Revolution in China. Chao was there after the Summer Palace was destroyed. He was a witness to the rise of the Red Guard. He saw teachers and other “enemies of the state” tortured, sometimes to death. His own parents were victims of a “struggle session” as soldiers his own age smashed through the house and beat his parents.

This was an incredible but grim read. To me it was nothing but terror and abuse, as the country fell into chaos. But Chao was more caught up in the struggle. At times, he wanted to fight against the class enemies, but when people he respected became targets, he would question why this revolution had to be so violent.

I would definitely recommend this book. I knew little about this time, so I found it darkly fascinating. It’s not for everyone. It is violent. But it’s an important record of real life.

Gave up at half way point. Too dry and boring, complicated and confusing. Have to say I lost interest long before quitting.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading this book. Truthfully, I didn't know much about the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CCR), going into it. I had definately heard the name Chairman Mao, but my knowledge from past history lessons failed me, and I didn't know much more than he was a bad guy (I know, that's sad).

The first chapter of the book, in which the author starts to explain the violence and humiliation that his family experienced started to give me an idea of what to expect, though. I do know alot about traditional Asian culture and how important family honor is, so I understood the significance of the public humiliation they suffered and how devestating it must have been.

To give a little background, in case you are as clueless as I was before I read this book about the CCR: The CCR started in May of 1966. It was a political movement inaugurated by Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao. Mao grew up a peasant and "organized other peasants to eventually bring revolution to all of China, forcing his great rival Chiang Kai-shek to flee to Taiwan."

Chairman Mao was worried that China would fall victim to what then President, Nixon, called a "peaceful evolution from socialism back to capitalism," something he believed the Soviet Union had already fallen victim to and he would not allow China to follow suit. However, Liu Shaoqi, the country's president, had very different ideas from Mao, who believed that China should "transform itself into a powerful nation state," which would require a cultural revolution.

Mao made his conflict with Liu Shaoqi known publicly in 1966, writing and publishing a public notice, denouncing the Party and referring to Shaoqi as "people like Nikita Khrushchev, referring to Stalins successor and leader of the Soviet Union. Even though The May Sixteenth notice became the framework for the CCR, it was met with resistance at first and most high-level officials remained loyal to Li Shaoqi, which made Mao furious. For the first time since becoming the Communist Party's leader, his "authority seemed less than absolute." In 1959, Mao had given temporary leadership to Liu Shaoqi and by 1966, many officials backed Shaoqi, and he "had become powerful enough to challenge Mao's authority."

Although Mao never actually feared a power struggle, he knew that the situation must be remedied. The author explains:
"From earliest childhood, I was taught that the West - America especially - was on the verge of extinction. America was dying. No, it was already dead, destroyed by greed and decadence."

The author also explains how in school, at the beginning of the CCR, they were asked to list things that were "Yes" (good for the State) and "No" (Bourgeois inclinations). Under the "No" category, they listed things like nylon stockings, stylish hairstyles, and for some reason, a pork dish that one of his class mates enjoyed, so his mother packed it for him to bring to school. The author described that classmate as the most innocent victim of exercise.

During the CCR, Mao was equivalent to a god and a billion copies of a book of his quotes was published, making it one of the most widely printed books ever, and during the CCR, it was almost illegal not to own and carry a copy. One of the first pages of this book shows a picture of the author and his two siblings, each holding a copy of the little red book.

I also was not aware of the existence of the Red Guards and was shocked at how young they were. The author was present a the same site, the day they first met and were officially established. The Red Guard started as a group of middle schoolers, ready to fight to the death to defend Mao and "Mao thought," and anyone "threatening the revolution."

I also knew nothing about the Big-Character-Posters (BCP) that were so prevalent during this time. Even though paper was so scarce that even obtaining toilet paper was rare in some places ,the BCPs were plastered EVERYWHERE - on the outside and inside of every building, including government offices, businesses, schools, and even outside of the city, in the country.

The author explains that they were everywhere inside his school, in classes, in the hallways, in the bathrooms, etc. There were so many what when there was no more space, people simply posted new ones on top of previously posted BCPs. These BCPs ruined lives and caused tradgedy in the 20 odd years the phenomena lasted (the CCR lasted a decade). The author explains:
"In some respects, BCPs constituted the first real opportunity for free expression within the country's legal system. They were considered 'the best route to a people's democracy' and 'a very effective weapon of a new generation.'"

They were anywhere and everywhere, all different colors and sizes, and could consist of anything the writer wanted to express. They could consist of slogans, poems, a passage from a book, an essay or even a cartoon, but even though the format varied widely, the content always aimed to shock.

No one was spared; anyone's dignity and privacy could be violated. Taking a person's remarks out of context, grossly exaggerating their actions - even slander or libel didn't raise eyebrows so long as the writer claimed 'a revolutionary stance' or 'a revolutionary purpose.' The only risk, should you have engaged in this practice, was that someone would retaliate by writing a poster to take you down too.

Here are a few pictures I found online (not from the book):

Image result for Big-Character-Posters Image result for Big-Character-PostersImage result for Big-Character-Posters

The author actually saw the first widely publicized BCP, two days after it was posted, and witnessed its author, a woman in her 40's, arguing with a group of men in front of it at Peking University, during his first trip to the campus. Mao had the message from the BCP broadcasted everywhere, which brought about more BCPs, with people arguing over who was for Mao and the revolution and who was against it, which fed into Mao's strategy to create disorder and achieve "great order from great disorder under the heavens."

This incited violence all over campuses in China, with Peking University being a "forerunner in many respects."

"As the huge and almost uncontrolled political energy inspired by the BCPs grew, revolutionary fever spread through teh whole University campus. Students began to torture their instructors, which only spurred more violence at other campuses across the country."

The author was unfortunately part of the first case. He didn't understand everything that was happening and he went to Peking University to see what was happening, to try to better understand but still didn't understand why professors were being called "monsters" and "devils," words he had only heard in stories and fairy tales.

Even at his middle school, students created a BCP titled "Fight to the Death for the Proletarian Dictatporship - Mao Thought" and posted it in a large classroom. It targeted the school administration, which furthered the agenda of the Red Guards, whose oldest members were 19, and the youngest only 13 years old.

I couldn't believe some of the things I read in this book, and I couldn't believe that I had never heard about any of this before! Children from every school, incited by Mao and his call for a cultural revolution, humiliated, beat and even killed many of their instructors and other school staff and faculty! It got so bad that many instructors committed suicide to avoid more violence.

The one thing I kept thinking over and over throughout this book, was how these were children - just middle schoolers and some high school age - carrying out the "revolution." Children who dragged their teachers out of classrooms and dragged people out of their houses and businesses - beating and sometimes killing them, for sometimes something as small as the name of their restaurant, their family's background, even the clothes and shoes they wore, or the way they styled their hair! And more incredulous: the government and law enforcement ENCOURAGED this!

I kept thinking about how I've been seeing/reading about kids today taunting people that don't look like them. We've all heard about the violence that has been happening all over the country, after the election, but what's going on in schools has been talked about less. Like the stories in this article: Kids Quoting Trump to Bully their Classmates and Teachers don't know what to do about it.

After a school assembly at a school that is 1/3 Latino, in which dozens of students chanted "Build that wall!" the principal talked with some of the kids and found that most had no idea what it meant. They were simply joining in, because others next to them were. Similarly, the author explains that he initially wanted to and later felt pressure to participate in the CCR with his peers.

There are tons of articles online, telling of the similar incidents all across the country, fueled by the so-called "president" and the things they hear from their parents. Although I don't foresee anyone plastering Trump's tweets up on the sides of buildings across the country, they might as well be, with all of the media coverage they get. Reading this book made me think long and hard about the similarities with the things that are happening on our country today, and what if all of the children who are chanting about building walls were to decide that their teachers are part of the problem. I have no doubt in my mind that Trump would support them.

I can't fathom what the author and his family experienced. They were treated horribly for reasons that would have never occurred to them as being "bad" or "traitorous." This book, like many other autobiographies by people who have survived such trauma, strengthens my faith in humanity and the power of hope among even the most hopeless.

I loved the ending! Although I was expecting... well, I don't exactly know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this ending!

I love how the author's life was changed by such an unexpected turn of events.

I am amazed at the things that happened during the CCR and am in awe of the author and his achievements, despite everything that his family went through. However, I cannot help relating things that I have been seeing/hearing/reading about what is happening today. While I know that the words/tweets of the so-called "president" would never be considered to be up there with the bible, there are too many people taking our not-so-great leader's words way too seriously.

Just like the holocaust, the Japanese internment camps after Pearl Harbor, and other tragedies, I think it is more important, now more than ever, for people to learn about the tragedies of the past so that we don't relive them in the future.

I really enjoyed this book. The author's writing was extraordinary, and the resilience and resolve he showed at such a young age is admirable. For most, it would have been easier to take the hand he was dealt and live the life that was forced upon him. Instead, he found a way to educate himself and lived to write this great book that taught me so much about Chinese history!

I received this book for free from the publishers, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Growing up during the heart of the Cultural Revolution, Wei Yang struggles to identify what is right and what is wrong. Brainwashed in school to blindly worship Chairman Mao, he is all for the revolution, but when his own parents become targets accused of collecting rent and spying for the U.S., Wei Yang starts to realize the rampant violence may not be necessary.
Good story, being able to see what it was like growing up during such a tumultuous time in Chinese history, however the writing was very simple and a tad repetitive.

It feels so authentic as if you were right in the middle of the events. This is a very good history book. I enjoyed a lot!

What is it like in the eye of a storm? What happens when you get sucked into that storm? This book gives you that view of the Cultural Revolution. Wei Yang Chao was there for the beginning. He helped chronicle it as a school reporter. He was part of it as a Red Guard. Then he saw it turn ugly. Eventually, he felt it’s fury as it engulfed him and his family.
This book is an incredibly hard book to read; there is so much violence and heartbreak. But it isn’t just a memoir. He takes the time to explain the political maneuverings that destroyed so many lives. It’s not just a political history either, but a good balance of both. I understand that time so much better now.
It is well written and very interesting. There are a few swear words, but for the subject, it is very clean. I would recommend it to anyone trying to understand the Cultural Revolution.
I received this as a free ARC from NetGalley and Avant Press. These are my honest opinions.

Red Fire is the first-hand account of a teen boy growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s. The story is at times confusing (some flashbacks, unfamiliar names, extremely difficult philosophical content, and some graphic violence to grapple with), but it’s worth the effort. The author vividly writes of first his fervor for the Revolution, but then he begins to question what he is seeing and experiencing. Watching his own parents be struggled against appears to be the final straw in his philosophy. The author is eventually sent away to be “re-educated.”

I found this book to be difficult to read for several reasons. First of all, even though I have studied Communism as played out in both the USSR and in China, it was still difficult to read about the violent treatment of people, sometimes for no reason at all other than someone had seized power over another. The base depravity and cruelty of humankind is difficult to observe. Secondly, I found parts of the book to be chilling in that they read very much like some of today’s news stories. Has mankind learned nothing in the past fifty years? Apparently not. Rebellion simply for the sake of rebellion never ends well.

This book would be good for high schoolers and college students to read. (Any adult, for that matter.) I think they especially need to read it because I see so many of them blindly espousing beliefs and mimicking actions without really thinking through the natural consequences or logical implications of those actions. We have enough history in this world to see plenty of patterns of behavior. There’s truly nothing new under the sun. If people ignore what has happened before, if people do not learn from history, then we are all indeed doomed to repeat it. Thus, this book would be an excellent example from which people could learn what happens when people blindly worship the thoughts of a fallible human with no regard for others and take to forcing those beliefs on others at whatever cost.

I gratefully received this book as an eARC from the author, publisher, and NetGalley in exchange for my unbiased review.

When I was growing up, China as well as the USSR were big blank blobs on the world map, referred to--if at all--as "behind the Iron Curtain." Communists--enemies--wholesale judgment, their history pretty much blank after the October Revolution for Russia, and Mao's takeover in the forties. (As of course they regarded the West.)

I only bumped up against the horrors of the Cultural Revolution when a teacher bitterly reviled my fellow teenagers during a period of campus unrest, saying we were the equivalent of the Red Guard teens who went around killing their teachers and parents. Really? But there was no way to check the facts.

My third exposure was when I walked into a bookstore in San Francisco, thinking I'd checked the latest sf or f publications, and instead discovered it was a bookstore specifically dedicated to communist and socialist writings.

I saw a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, and leafed through it, finding a lot of its contradictory exhortations reminded me disturbingly of Orwell's 1984. It didn't help that the proprietor (who, by the way, was selling these for a stiff price, thus capitalism) lectured me on my perfidy as white, dressed obviously female. The Red Guard, she said, dressed like proletariat--you could not tell if a person was male or female as all cut their hair alike and wore the same type of clothes, and romance was punished as being selfish, insufficiently dedicated to the greater good of the people.

Ooookay, then. I walked out, and the seventies happened, and slowly I began to learn by bits and bobs about Chinese history.

My question, always, is 'but what was it like for ordinary people during those years?' I collect memoirs, diaries, letters, and autobiographies as I learn about different periods. When fellow fantasy writer Malinda Lo came to Mythcon a few years ago, she mentioned that her grandmother had been kept from leaving China during the Cultural Revolution, and I bought her book.

So when I saw Red Fire on NetGalley, I grabbed it.

The book is short, but packed with vivid descriptions and clear-eyed, passionate insights. Make no mistake. Much of it is quite grim, as Wei Yang Chao was caught up in a horrifically grim period. It begins with his family enduring a "struggle session"--in which Red Guards made it their business to beat elders, sometimes to death, while forcing them to denounce themselves, and their children to denounce them.

The author was a teen at the time, a fairly experienced Red Guard. He grew up under Mao's Revolution, and accepted revolutionary fervor and teachings. He was one of the million or so who traveled to Tiananmen Square to hear Mao exhort them to revolution, without then realizing the ugly political motivation for the occasion: no less than to undermine Mao's former colleague.

The author was also there, by chance, when the Red Guard first emerged by destroying an ancient Summer Palace that families used to go visit to enjoy the pleasant gardens. The Red Guard movement soon swept the country, and music, art, ancient artifacts, teachers, and intellectuals of any kind were dragged out to be tortured, humiliated, and often killed. In their fervor, many Red Guards killed their parents as anti-revolutionaries and reactionaries, because true believers were orphans, dedicated only to Mao.

Thousands of years of history were destroyed in rampages, and of course education--pronounced evil and reactionary--ground to a halt. Those students, teachers, and college-educated people who survived were sent to be re-educated by peasants, who were scrabbling a living under the collective farm plans, which manifestly didn't work. Farmers who had fared well now scratched for subsistence, and weren't best pleased to have useless students and intellectuals stuck on them. But--just as it had been under the emperors--if you were at the bottom, you endured.

The author lived in a cave for three years as he scraped manure out of latrines to plant around seeds.

He also made a pilgrimage to Mao's birthplace, along with uncounted thousands, as religious fervor centered around Mao. The new rituals made the Massachusetts Pilgrim Sundays look like total hedonism, with the morning and evening ritual facing Mao's picture, the unison chantings and songs, then everyone reading out loud from the Little Red Book--which of course you carried everywhere. And everybody had to stand and do those rituals, including patients in hospitals.

The author talks about his teenage exhilaration, and the gradual comprehension of what revolution really meant, demonstrated in excruciating personal terms, while everyone, from Madame Mao to the fervent female Red Guards pronounced that "revolution is never wrong!" when they killed someone by accident, or destroyed a place that turned out not to be counter-revolutionary after all. Violence for the sake of violence cast a country of millions into terror while they lived in brutish circumstances.

It's not 100 % grim. There are lovely moments about his family life before the Red Guard got going. A funny note was the necessity for every bit of dialogue to be safely prefaced by a quote from Mao. The author gives an example, as a boy attempts to get a pen from a girl shopkeeper. Every exchange between the two of them is prefaced by a Mao quote. The conversation gets quite heated as he wants a specific pen, and she wants him to take what she gives him. The quotes get more and more pointed as tempers rise.

We come back around to the struggle session, and how the author, experienced in the rhetoric of revolution, wrote scripts for his family. His father had already been badly beaten, and this struggle session could easily end with both parents murdered before the children's eyes, while they could do nothing lest they be deemed unrevolutionary.

Though the Chinese government did their best to eradicate their own history and culture, there were aspects of the revolution that struck me as fundamentally Chinese. I noticed them in this and the memoir mentioned above: the insistence on making people wear dunce caps, kowtowing to Mao's portrait, and slogans such as "The four olds" and "the three faces."

It's absorbing, and sometimes called to mind the more brutish rhetoric when peasants were armed and permitted, nay encouraged, to roam the streets of Paris, killing anyone who demonstrated "aristo" tendencies--which could be the wearing of a new coat. You were safer in rags and dirt.

It's human nature at its ugliest, and the seeds of it lie in all of us.

At fourteen, a boy is caught up in the 1966 Cultural Revolution created by Chairman Mao to enforce the leader’s vision of Chinese ideology. Huge bands of children and young adults, known as The Red Guard, were persuaded to accept this concept and became involved in humiliating citizens accused of being counterrevolutionaries, school teachers of spreading anti-Mao propaganda, and any individual accused of individual thought or emotion. “Red Fire” is Wei Yang Chao’s memoir of his awakening after early, rather uncomfortable, participation in the madness.

At first, Wei was entranced by the concept and fervor behind this revolutionary behavior. But, after witnessing his family being subjected to “struggle sessions,” i.e. public humiliation and beatings, for their role as landowners that put them at odds with Mao’s mandated policies, he began to doubt his commitment. As time went on, his resistance to the radical behavior cast him as a pariah and he became an outcast in his own country. He was sent for re-education far from home and his family.

There is pathos in his story. The cruel and thoughtless actions of the controlled and witless devotees to Mao’s policies began to send vibrations of doubt and disgust through him until actual rage took over and he could no longer accept the mind control that swept China. The author’s confusion is obvious and one can only wonder how the revolution was ever accepted by the masses in the first place. But, as Wei explains it, “loyalty worked a kind of black magic in those years, and we were all of us thoroughly bewitched.”

As further explanation of the hypnotism of the nation during the Cultural
Revolution, the author tells of the massive “pilgrimages” of 1966, actually journeys to spread revolutionary ideas and to learn from one another, when a hundred million people went on the road to visit locations that served as a “sacred” base for revolutionary action. Although China is an atheist nation, Mao was considered a god and his mandates were blindly followed.

There is murkiness in this memoir that sometimes makes it hard to follow, but Wei forges ahead and drags the reader through struggles that even his own mind labored to comprehend.

The book is a vivid study of ruthless power and convoluted thinking that challenges the freedom of people everywhere. It’s a must read, particularly during this time of world disorder and division. Although the reader might still be perplexed at all the confusion, I strongly recommend reading it. It is very enlightening.