Moying Li adds to the small body of children’s and young adult literature about growing up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Her memoir begins when she is four years old, during the Great Leap Forward that signaled the beginning of the revolution. At first, her family and neighbors embraced the ideals enthusiastically but gradually they come to realize, and experience firsthand, fear and oppression at the government’s hands. Moying is surrounded by family who love her, who value education—and who are determined to survive. After her father is sent to a labor camp, he manages to smuggle a reading list home to Moying and her brother so that they can continue their education on their own, after the schools have shut down. The books she reads sustain her through long years of struggle. As Moying grows, so too does her understanding of what is happening around her. In addition to providing a firsthand account of life in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, the author weaves in stories from her parents’ and grandparents’ pasts. Most intriguing are those about her intelligent and strong-willed grandmother, who at age three refused to let her aunt bind her feet and who was educated in a time when few girls were. Moying’s strong sense of self and thirst for education seem to have come directly from her grandmother, a tremendous source of influence and inspiration. (Ages 11–14)

Moying Li’s coming-of-age memoir follows the fortunes of her Beijing family as they live through terrible times. The story begins in her courtyard home in the summer of 1958, when the heady enthusiasm of the Great Leap Forward gripped her family, and continues through the tyranny and persecu tion of the Cultural Revolution, which Moying experiences both at home and school. The death of Chairman Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1977 open a door that allows Moying to leave her country and study in America. mac

A young woman grows up under Maoist oppression in China and survives through the power of reading in this “simply and hauntingly told” YA memoir (The New York Times).

In 1966, Moying Li was a young student in Beijing, destined for a promising future. But everything changed when student Red Guards began a series of brutal assaults, public humiliations, and forced confessions. After witnessing her teachers beaten in public, Moying fled for the safety of home, only to see her grandmother denounced, her home ransacked, her father’s precious books confiscated, and Baba himself taken away.

From a labor camp, Baba entrusted a friend to deliver a reading list of banned books to Moying so that she could continue to learn. With so much of her life at risk, she still found sanctuary in the world of imagination and language.

This inspiring memoir follows Moying Li from age twelve to twenty-two, illuminating a complex, dark time in China’s history as it tells the compelling story of one girl’s difficult but determined coming-of-age during the Cultural Revolution.