num_pages: 480
description: A revealing memoir of human resilience in the face of nightmarish power. With clear vision this intimate memoir draws us into the intersections of everyday life and Communist power from the first days of Liberation in 1949 through the Tiananmen Square protests and after. The son of a professional family Kang Zhengguo is a free spirit drawn to literature. In Mao's China these innocuous circumstances expose him at the age of twenty to a fierce struggle session expulsion from university and a four-year term of hard labor in Xian's Number Two Brickyard. So begins his long stay in the prison-camp system a story of hardship and poignance of warmth and humor in the face of cruelty. He finally escapes the Chinese gulag by forfeiting his identity: at age twenty-eight he is adopted by an aging bachelor in a peasant village which enables him to start a new life. Rehabilitated after Mao's death Kang finds himself still subject to the recurring nightmare of party authority. 15 illustrations
language: English
title: Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company