Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
This isn't fiction but it's a fascinating and shocking memoir of three generations of women in China.
It's written by Jung Chang about her grandmother, mother and her own experiences living in China. It starts in the 1920's and goes through the 1980s. She is now a professor in England but visits China occasionally.
The traditional Chinese culture was hard and severe but nothing compared to what Mao did to it.
It is completely insane how he created "The Great Leap Forward" that forced everyone in the country to abandon agriculture in order to run makeshift metal smelters. Every village had to melt down every scrap of metal, including all cookware, to make useless slags of pot metal. They say more people starved to death as a result of this than just about any other time in history.
Then later he created the Cultural Revolution which sounded a lot like the kind of world the extreme right seems to want. Education and intelligence were considered crimes. He created the Red Guard, gangs of kids, that were instructed to tear up peoples homes, torture adults, burn all books and libraries, and destroy all artwork and museums. Even grass lawns and flowers were forbidden and torn out. His goal was to completely eliminate all remnants of Chinese knowledge, history and art from the world. Worse than the Taliban.
Later he instigated wars between different gangs of Red Guards so they would start killing each other.
Jaw dropping in that it's all real.
These are just a few of the experiences the author had to live through.
She starts with her grandmother who lived at the end of the old Chinese culture and then follows their lives through WWII up to the beginning of modern China today.
it's an breathtaking, eye opening story and it occurred to me that much of the extreme right's passions have the same flavor as Mao's unbelievable insanity towards the world and humanity.
It's fairly long but I'd recommend it.
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