Books-Historical

It is available at every corner of life; whether in the library or the bookstore, it helps enrich our lives as we know them.

From the first time that I started reading and then transitioned from picture books to chapter books, I was hooked. Over the next thirty-plus years, I read all the books I could like to read, memoirs, like Mary Tyler Moore’s After All, Dick Van Dyke’s My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir, and Robyn Davidson’s Tracks.

The most recent book that I read was Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai. This book was about how the author Nien Cheng was living in Shanghai when the Cultural Revolution which went from 1966 to 197s. Why did this event happen? It happened because the government wanted control and want to rid of anything or anyone who got in the way of maintaining control. The Chinese government saw Nien as a threat to the regime because she had worked for an American corporation and had her under house arrest and heavy interrogation. I won’t say much else except no one close to her was spared.

Her memoir resonated with me as did all stories told about the Cultural Revolution. My late grandmother Zhang Rong “Helen” came from a wealthy background and because of that was made a target. When the cultural Revolution had started, she was taken to a re-education camp and forced to stay for three years. For those three years she was kept away from her husband, my grandfather and five children, elderly mother, and eventually a nephew.

To me Cultural Revolution was not only a traumatic event as my late grandmother had to go through suffering, but also a painful legacy that a lot of people from Mainland China had to endure and carry to this day and will continue to carry on.