I, uh, stalkerish-ly grabbed it off your wishlist...
I like what the story does with the White Snake story, especially because I did not realize that Green/Blue Snake was originally a man in heaven and gender-transformed, but it never quite caught me. But! YMMV, especially because I tend to bounce off literary fiction and short stories.
Some of the Cultural Revolution stories I heard about Red Guard kids my age were scary, really scary. I remember hearing a bunch of them when I was in San Francisco, visiting the Haight Ashbury (not to get stoned, but looking for book stores) and I came across a Chinese book store. Turned out to be Maoist, and they were giving away copies of Chairman Mao's little red book. But when we went inside, we ended up in the middle of a fairly tense discussion on what propaganda was saying was going on in China (everything was wonderful) and what was really going on, according to relatives still there (everything was really, really horrible).
Yeah, stories of the Red Guard kids were where most of the horror stories came from. I think part of it is horror at breaking Confucian hierarchy, but a lot is plain and simple fear of knowing that people close to you might turn on you at any second!
Yes. The thing that struck me was how very similar these stories were to stories I'd heard in Austria about the Hitler Youth--and read about youngsters during the early, Terror years of the French Revolution.
Huh. I'm wondering if this is one of the stories that I read for my Chinese literature class back in college.
...but no, the pub-date is too late. The book I'm thinking of would have had to have been published in English by 1992. But it a ballet dancer under political pressure/investigation by the government, there was a covert love affair with another dancer who may or may not have been working for the government, and the book had lots of gritty, gritty details about sweat.
For that class, we also watched a lot of films by Fifth Generation Directors. And as with your teachers, the professor who taught us that class told us his personal stories about the Cultural Revolution. For what it's worth, we found them horrifying.
I... yeah. I do not think I can read or watch many more depressing stories about the Cultural Revolution, just because of all the exposure in school and because they make me want to go spork China, even though that is not necessarily fair of me.
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I like what the story does with the White Snake story, especially because I did not realize that Green/Blue Snake was originally a man in heaven and gender-transformed, but it never quite caught me. But! YMMV, especially because I tend to bounce off literary fiction and short stories.
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---L.
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...but no, the pub-date is too late. The book I'm thinking of would have had to have been published in English by 1992. But it a ballet dancer under political pressure/investigation by the government, there was a covert love affair with another dancer who may or may not have been working for the government, and the book had lots of gritty, gritty details about sweat.
For that class, we also watched a lot of films by Fifth Generation Directors. And as with your teachers, the professor who taught us that class told us his personal stories about the Cultural Revolution. For what it's worth, we found them horrifying.
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