Tearful Youth (Red Memories novel series 1) (English Edition)

Tearful Youth (Red Memories novel series 1) (English Edition)

1. Description of Red Memories novel series

Red Memories novel series is composed of five books, namely, Tearful Youth, Rainbow Bridge, Withered Flowers, Awful Catastrophe and Generation Lost, which are closely linked together as an integral whole by the development of important events and the miserable fate of the main characters, but each of which can be read on its own.

The novel series covers all the major political movements launched by Mao Zedong, such as the Anti-Rightist Struggle, the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Movement, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and so on across the whole span of Mao’s times. The complete process of these political movements is brought to light for the first time in the form of literature, while tragic stories one after another faithful to the real life at that time are narrated throughout the whole set of novels.

Over the past three decades and more, as the CPC authorities strictly forbid writers in Mainland China to write literary works about the political movements waged by Mao since Mao's death, no novels reflecting Mao’s times in this connection have appeared so far.

The author’s aim of writing this novel series is to perfectly preserve that part of strange and unique history of about three decades in modern China paid for with such a cost of tears, blood and the numerous lives of the Chinese people..

The five novels of the series (Chinese edition) were published in Hong Kong in 1987 and 1992 respectively. They were highly recommended in the literary circles in Hong Kong and elsewhere after their publication. Professor Yuan Liangjun, research fellow with the Institute of Literature under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in his work History of Different Schools of Fiction in Hong Kong (published in 2008 by Fujian Publishing House) that “It is the only novel series so far portraying the ultra-Left errors in China during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s of the last century. With its grand boldness of vision and very true-to-life setting, the novel series profoundly reflects the tragic history of that period.”

The one-volume Chinese edition of the novel series was published in Hong Kong in September 2008. One month later, the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, the most authoritative literary institution in China, collected it as a rare book permanently.

The author is greatly encouraged by Perry Link, well-known Sinologist and professor of Princeton University, who said in his letter to the author, “I salute you. Many people, of course, lived through the tumultuous times that you lived through, but very few wrote so much about it, and with such a grand and comprehensive sweep. Certainly your work deserves to be translated into English and other languages.” So the author has translated the novel series into English in hopes that the Western readers could have an opportunity to know and understand the true and complete picture of Mao’s era thoroughly.

2. Brief Introduction to Tearful Youth

Tearful Youth is the story about Simon Chan, a young man full of patriotic zeal, who returns to his homeland -- China from Hong Kong to study at a university in mid fifties. Instead, he finds himself trying to keep one step ahead of the Anti-Rightist Struggle that took place in 1957. The movement which had a profound influence on the development of China’s modern history was aimed at ruthlessly suppressing the vast number of honest, upright and outspoken intellectuals and college students, setting a very bad precedent for dealing with the intellectuals in the subsequent political movements. The novel realistically, vividly and minutely brings to light all these things with convincing events, plots and characters through description of the experience of Simon and his relations with other people.
Tearful Youth is the only novel that truly narrates the whole process of the Anti-Rightist Struggle so far.

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