FROM TEA TO COFFEE

In this debut memoir, Wang recounts life in northeast China during the turbulent years of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution and his attempts to find purpose in the wake of its disintegration.

The author’s family suffered under the tyranny of Red Guard harassment, especially Wang’s mother, who was labeled an enemy of the state as a result of her privileged family background. Nonetheless, the author was an eager devotee of Mao’s philosophy and “ready to assume my role in emancipating humankind.” In 1975, as a teenager, he was sent to TianXi (the name means “heavenly happiness”), a peasant village in Inner Mongolia, for radical reeducation, an experience designed to destroy any allegiance to authority, including his family’s, that competed with Mao’s. However, his encounter with this “naturally harsh landscape and difficult lifestyle” was never fully realized; the revolution died with Mao less than a year later, and China’s new leader, Deng Xiaoping, ushered in a new regimen of reforms aimed at modernization. Wang was brainwashed by this “gigantic vortex” of political ideology, a predicament lucidly depicted by the author: “My inner voice served to suppress any encroaching doubts even before they could surface. I, like millions of others all over China, honestly believed in this course, the one that would lead to a better world for humankind.” The author would have to reinvent his own sense of purpose as well as his understanding of the character of his homeland, an especially difficult undertaking since he moved to the United States to pursue his studies—a “culture-crossing expedition”—and settled with a wife and child in North Carolina.

Wang’s remembrance is a deeply thoughtful one, communicated in prose full of studious concentration and careful precision. His reflection on the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution on China is well considered and searching, and he exposes the nuanced, myriad ways it left an indelible impact on the tenor of Chinese daily life. “In the post-Mao era, this social rift has grown into a subtler, but more profound phenomenon: aloofness between people. It is present between almost any two people. For instance, when you go to a restaurant in China and the waitress comes to you with a stern face, do not take it personally. Emotional distancing was—and still is—a norm within the country.” His life is both inspiring—he eventually finds success in American corporate life—and cinematically eventful. Swallowed by the forces of history and then unceremoniously spit out, he finds his own destiny. The best of Wang’s memoir is his consideration of the abrupt shift from one newly adopted cultural identity to another and the subsequent feelings of dislocation and distrust. The author avoids any political proselytizing. In fact, he expresses a respect for the intentions of Mao, however disastrously executed. This is not principally a political tract but rather a personal one, though it deftly raises questions of a grand cultural and historical nature.

A captivating account of a complex chapter in Chinese history.