Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China
by Kang Zhengguo
Zhengguo grew up in the city of Xi’an but he was then exiled to the countryside, and lived a significant part of his life in an ordinary village. So he’s someone who experienced both urban and rural China.
Recommendations from our site
“I wasn’t excited about reading this book at first, because I thought it would be yet another familiar account of suffering during the Cultural Revolution. And yet the book really won me over. And that’s partly because it deals with the 1950s as well as the Cultural Revolution of 1966 through 1976. Indeed it goes beyond that to the author’s subsequent journey to the United States. I think the book loses a lot when it gets past the 1980s, but the earlier parts are an amazing evocation not just of suffering but also of daily life in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.” Read more...
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian
