Title: The dragon's pearl
First published: 1994
Description: In this astonishing memoir by the only foreigner ever raised inside the remote world of China's powerful and reclusive leadership, Sirin Phathanothai provides a one-of-a-kind eyewitness account of daily life among the near-mythic founders of Mao's Communist China.

In 1956, eight-year-old Sirin Phathanothai and her twelve-year-old brother, Warnwai, were secretly sent as an offering of goodwill from Thailand's political elite to China's, a "living bridge" between the two countries at a time when Thailand was publicly a determined enemy of China. Politically precocious Sirin, daughter of the Prime Minister of Thailand's closest advisor, was tossed into the very center of Mao's revolutionary China as the ward of Premier Zhou Enlai.

Until his death in 1976, "Zhou Bobo" (Uncle Zhou), as Sirin called him, undertook to educate her in the ways of China. One of Zhous̀ closest advisors, Liao Ghengzhi, became her "father." She came to know the legendary founders of Communist China - Zhu Deh, father of the Red army; Foreign Minister Chen Yi; and President Liu Shaoqi.

Sirin encountered Mao himself during many informal gatherings and observed him in meetings with foreign visitors. The leaders' children, many of whom are prominent in China today, became her friends. Two years into her stay in China, the Thai government was overthrown and her father was jailed. Sirin and her brother assumed they would return home; instead, Premier Zhou told them, "You are now children of China." It would be years before she had any contact with her family in Thailand again.

In 1966, while Sirin was attending Beijing University, the Cultural Revolution began, and the world she had come to know, and love, was torn apart. Her Japanese fiance was forced to leave the country and Sirin was made to denounce her brother and father, who had come to China carrying a message from Lyndon Johnson, over Radio Beijing. Under attack himself, Zhou could save her only by sending her into hiding deep in the heart of rural China.

There, and later in a factory in Beijing, Sirin endured a life far harsher, and far more dangerous, than she had ever imagined. In 1970, fourteen years after Sirin first arrived in China for what her father had told her would be an "adventure," Zhou signed papers to get her secretly to England. Ironically, Sirin's relationship with China was just beginning.
Subjects: Relations, Biography
Places: Thailand, China
People: Sirin Phathanothai
LC classification: CT1548.S476 A3 1994