Can Chinese Free Themselves?
Click here to read all of David Frum’s blogposts from China.
A reader sends this comment about my post on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He tells the life story of an academic colleague:
S. grew up in central China, the daughter of the town mayor. During the Cultural Revolution her father was jailed for years. She was only 3 years old. She and her mother were ostracized and mocked, and without income. They survived because S. went every day to the town market with a cup and picked up grains of rice as she moved underneath the tables on which rice was sold and found a few grains at a time in the dirt.
She was able to go to school, then work in a university as a secretary, then travel to the West as a student, then marry. She and her husband settled in Canada. Arriving without any English, she completed a graduate degree in English literature, supporting herself by working hours at a Chinese restaurant. She now works in an academic department of a Canadian university, a survivor of horrors barely imaginable.
"When I gave her the book Mao: the Unknown Story last year she spoke to me with great pain, saying "You must not think that of our beloved Mao. He is our hero. He rescued our nation. To take away him is to take away our hope for China."