Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard

A Chinese Horatio Alger Anson Cassel Mills This memoir is simply great story telling, a Chinese Horatio Alger tale where pluck and luck win out in the end. (Shen admits his admiration for Stendal's The Red and the Black and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, but it would be ungracious to push the analogies too closely.) For some reason Chinese culture permits a more casual, even humorou. Amazon Customer said This book was a fun and interesting read. This book was a fun and interesting read. I also learned a lot about the Chinese cultural revolution which was really eye opening for me. I recommend it!. "a view of life under Mao" according to Ron Lief. an online friend suggested that I might find this an interesting readIt turned out to be much more than that. It is a fascinating look at a world I never knew. The memory of this man's struggles will stay with me a long long time. His willingness to show us how a man must sometimes compromise his ideals in order to escape from an impossible sit

Gang of One recounts how Shen escaped, again and again, from his appointed fate. In 1966 12-year-old Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China's Cultural Revolution. It is also, in spite of circumstances of remarkable grimness and injustice, an unlikely picaresque tale of adventure full of courage, cunning, wit, tenacity, resourcefulness, and sheer luck - the story of how Shen managed to scheme his way through a hugely oppressive system and emerge triumphant. Following a path strewn with perils and pitfalls, twists and surprises worthy of Dickens, Shen's story is ultimately an exuberant human comedy unlike any other.. His secret self-education took him from the factory to college, where friendship with an American teacher earned him the wrath of the secret police. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, Shen's Gang of One is more than a memoir of one young man's harrowing experience during a time of terror. Disillusionment soon followed, then turned to disgust and