The Revenge of Heaven: Journal of a Young Chinese, by Ken Ling (Putnam, 413 pp., $8.95). “Gangsters became ‘Red Guards’ at night, practicing extortion on lovers in the parks and dark alleys and committing robbery. . . . It was the beginning of a descent into chaos. . . . The popular saying of the day became: ‘The uglier one is, the better; the poorer one’s family, the better; the redder one’s background, the better’.” “Ken Ling”—the pseudonym of a teen-age ex-Red Guard— knows, and, aided by three American scholars, tells a chilling, horrifying tale of what life during the Red Chinese “Cultural Revolution” was like. This book is first-rate reportage; it is incomparably the best “inside” modern China book I’ve yet read. “Ken Ling” is obviously a highly intelligent young man, one who, like millions of his countrymen, fell for (most, evidently, still fall for) the madness of Mao’s Paradise-in-training. He shows us the utter regimentation, even the regimentation of chaos, that typified Red China in the mid-Sixties. He recounts a devastating litany of murder, suicide, systematic stealing, revealing what the “disease of ‘leftist juvenilism’ ” was like, graphically depicting a nation where youths were turned against their elders and against each other. The Cultural Revolution purges eventually extended to Mao’s enemies in the Party hierarchy, but first they started with the school teachers: “They all wore dunce caps painted with . . . epithets and carried dirty brooms. . . . Hanging from their necks were pails filled with rocks. I saw the principal; the pail around his neck was so heavy that the wire had cut deep into his neck. Beatings and torture followed. I had never seen such tortures before: eating nightsoil [excrement] and insects; being subjected to electrical shocks; forced to kneel on broken glass; being hanged ‘airplane’ by the arms and legs.” Of course, as everyone knows, and as such objective observers as John Stewart Service recently told us in the Times, everything is perfect now. One hopes that Mr. Nixon had a pleasant weekend in Paradise.
d. brudnoy
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