I recently met the poet Wang Ping via twitter, a social medium that — at its best — can illuminate the time-space continuum and all its riches.
Wang Ping was a child during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and wrote a poem — “Flash of Selfish Consciousness” — about her experiences as an “excellent Red Guard of Chairman Mao.”
At a live reading, Wang dedicated her poem, "Flash of Selfish Consciousness" to the memory of the cultural revolution.
“I grew up there,” she said, “and for 10 years I had to write self criticism every day… Since I came here I never had to do it and sometimes I get kind of nostalgic.”
Wang Ping’s poem — complete with ironically understated Red Guard vignettes and whimsical snatches of rhetoric from Mao’s teachings — sparked recollections of our own cultural revolution here in America.
Read more...