Red Fire

In August 1966, at the age of fourteen, a young boy is thrust into a world of violence and chaos as the Cultural Revolution blazes across China. Fifty years later, Red Fire offers the first intimate account from someone who lived through these events and survived. What was the Cultural Revolution like as seen through the eyes of a child? How do people surrender themselves to ideological frenzy? How does one break free? Wei Yang Chao tells a riveting story: how rebels attacked and publicly humiliated his family, upended his education, and sent him out into a country rendered unrecognizable by violence and radical ideology. As Wei Yang is swept up by the Red Guards, at heart a gentle boy, finds himself at the center of a bloody revolution. Red Fire reveals his families’ struggles in an increasingly isolated and hostile culture. Sent to boarding school in Beijing, young Wei Yang finds that beyond the gates enclosing that peculiar, closed world, conflict roils Chinese society. When mass rallies at Tiananmen Square are followed with attacks on teachers and professors, Wei Yang witnesses the disintegration of his parents’ lives as tolerance and freedom begin to crumble and he himself is cast into exile. Red Fire chronicles social upheaval through the keen yet naive eyes of a teenager, giving readers a fascinating and unprecedented glimpse into the Chinese Cultural Revolution. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real force and heartbreaking honesty.