The Unceasing Storm: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

by Katherine Luo

Just over fifty years ago, China’s Cultural Revolution began. The movement was intended to bring about a return to revolutionary Maoist beliefs and resulted in attacks on intellectuals and those believed to be counter-revolutionaries, capitalists and rightists; a large-scale purge in government posts; the appearance of a personality cult around Mao Zedong; and an estimated death count of between one and three million.


When Katherine Luo moved from Hong Kong to mainland China in 1955 to study drama and opera, she hoped her ideals and patriotism might help to build her country. Like many citizens, she loved the motherland and admired its revolutionary leaders. After years of completely trusting the regime, rationalizing its decisions and betrayals, and criticizing herself for doubting the Party, she realized that no matter how much she loved China, it would never love her back because she had the wrong background—capitalist class origins and overseas connections.


The Unceasing Storm describes Luo’s personal struggles—among other things, she was expelled from university, forbidden to marry her first love, and accused of being a spy—but it is also the memoir of a generation, representative of similar incidents occurring all over China. Luo’s colleagues and famous artists were dogged by their backgrounds—the unluckiest in the “to be executed, imprisoned or placed under surveillance” category; family members and teachers were labelled rightists; friends and war heroes were imprisoned; careers were ruined, families separated, ordinary people lifted to power one morning and destroyed overnight.


Some of those with stories to tell perished, of those who lived, many prefer to forget, and others burned all written records to avoid being incriminated. When the people involved in the revolution have all died, it will be all too easy to forget or pretend it never happened. The Unceasing Storm is one step towards creating a truthful record of contemporary China.

ebook

First published March 31, 2018

Reviews

[Vontel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recommend a read of this book of essays/vignettes/memoir by someone no longer living in China, who lived through many of the challenges and wrongs of Chinese history of the past century, some of it through her father's paths and the influences on her path. Her father originally joined the Kuomintang, then later became an operative for the Communist party under Mao. She grew up in Hong Kong under British Colonial rule and insisted, as a patriotic act, on going to mainland China for some of her secondary & then post-secondary education. She lived through the many shifts in power, politics, and policy under Mao, and post-Mao. Her family past became a political "taint", coming from outside mainland China, and she didn't understand many of the effects and changes under the various insider actions. She struggled to be able to live under the regimes, when denied many opportunities to advance her chosen career in music, in spite of her good marks, and spent several years labouring in the rural areas under the "cultural Revolution/Red Guard" era. However, she did manage to marry, with one daughter. Ultimately after Tianamen Square, she returned to Hong Kong while in her early 50's, only to experience the handover to China in 1997. She does use a gentle approach to descriptions of what must have been sometimes horrific experiences.

She immigrated to Canada at 62, and taught Mandarin at Simon Fraser University for several years. One of her concerns is the change in Chinese society with the shift to focus on "gold" and capitalism, without real change in the political system of repression and mistreatment, and that the generations growing up there now don't even know about their history, with the Great Leaps Forward, the mass starvations, the Cultural Revolution, Tianamen Square due to willful repression by those in power, and also by the wilful forgetting by many who took part in the activities enacted as part of those years, who otherwise might have to face their own injurious actions, and their effects on other. She also presents a case that nothing has really changed in the political system over the years, regardless of the current propaganda and public face. Her writing is vivid and detailed, and the accounts she writes of many of her one time friends, colleagues, and repressive political contacts(sometimes they were all three) let us gain some perspectives we might otherwise not understand. She also has useful & helpful historical & cultural footnotes, with the explanations listed for them together at the back of the book.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The plain-speak non-fiction book you need BEFORE reading Do Not Say We Have Nothing. There is nothing extraordinary about the language in this book, but the weight of the stories themselves give The Unceasing Storm: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution extraordinary torque to allow the reader a chance to wrap his head around the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It gives a fantastic, true background to this far-reaching period of recent Chinese history in short chapters that give you an uncanny impression of slipping into author Katherine Luo's memory. It links wonderfully to her present-day life in Vancouver and is altogether heart-wrenching, -breaking, and -touching. An essential read for anyone hoping to delve into this subject... I am glad Luo got her story down on paper.