For people of my generation, the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976) was something that happened during our adolescence and young adulthood. It was a socio-political phenomenon that was shielded from international scrutiny because China was closed to all but carefully vetted foreign visitors from the time the People's Republic was declared in 1949, until 1974. So if our generation knew about the Cultural revolution at all, we knew very little. (And those few Lefties in the West who waved about Mao's Little Red Book of ideology as propaganda for their cause, had no idea either.)

My recent reading of Chinese literature has given me some idea of the social and domestic implications of this period in China's history, but nothing I've previously read compares with the insights from this new memoir from Chinese-born Vivian Bi. Now living in Australia, Bi was a product of the Cultural Revolution which swung into action when she was a small child. By the time she was fifteen and orphaned by her mother's death, she had absorbed the ideology - and accepted (albeit resentfully) that her life and opportunities were irrevocably compromised by her father's denunciation as a 'Rightist' (i.e. suspected of harbouring capitalist or traditional sympathies). He and her five brothers had been despatched to work in remote rural regions for re-education among the peasants and she was brought up by her mother in poverty, because her father's salary was first halved and then taken away altogether, and her mother was 'advised to resign' from the work force. Her mother augmented their tiny income by providing child care for her grandchildren but teenage Bi was always conscious of her 'bad origins' as well as her dowdy clothes which were overt symbols of her poverty.

However, her mother had memories of a different life before the revolution, a time when she could travel, wear elegant clothes and eat well. And although Bi was just a teenager when her mother died, she inherited a taste for adventure along with remarkable adaptability and astonishing resilience. She stayed on alone in the family home rather than submit to living with Father's detested first wife, and she learned very quickly all the survival skills she didn't have: how to cook the meagre rations; how to manage the stove during Beijing's bitter winter, and most importantly – at the same time as working hard at school and achieving excellent results – she learned to save her money so that she could travel.

However...

One of the lasting effects of Mao's revolution was the damage it did to the bonds between children and parents, husbands and wives, teachers and students, neighbours, colleagues and siblings. This led to many estrangements during the Cultural Revolution that endure to this day. (p.102)

Because of the restrictions on travel, Bi could only satisfy her dreams to see the world by visiting her brothers. She had ambitions to climb mountains near the places where they lived, but her 'official' reasons were to visit relations who were following Mao's instructions to work in the developing regions. In the case of her brother Yang, this meant visiting the fabled Sichuan region, on the other side of the Quinling Mountains, the natural border between north and south China, and its landscapes and culture were exotic. But it also meant confronting her sister-in-law who had denounced her mother...
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/03/bright-swallow-by-vivian-bi/ ( )