About the Book
A tailor's son. A broken era.
An unbroken life.
Dai Wenjin was born in 1948 into a grassroots tailor's family in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province. He grew up in a cramped alleyway, doing his homework under a streetlamp because his family had no electricity. He lived through the Cultural Revolution as a factory worker. And then, through a single anomalous opportunity in a broken educational system, he entered Tsinghua University, China's most prestigious institution.
For decades, Western literature on the Cultural Revolution has been dominated by accounts of intense, singular trauma or the political fall of high-ranking elites. This memoir is strikingly different. Written with the analytical, even-keeled eye of the professor Dai Wenjin became, it offers a rare, fiercely authentic glimpse into how ordinary, working-class citizens navigated the tectonic shifts of mid-century China.
He does not sanitize the era, nor does he write with vindictive bitterness. He captures the baffling contradictions of the time with the clarity of someone who simply lived through them.
This book was compiled, translated and edited by his daughter, Shasha Dai, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. It is published in the United States because it cannot be published in China. Mentioning the Cultural Revolution now requires approval from the central government's Propaganda Department. A private translation attempt by the family was automatically deleted by a Chinese app's censorship filters in real time. The event was not dramatic. It was silent, automated and absolute.
"Do you learn the technique of hunting, or do you simply pack enough dry rations?"
