Chinese history buffs will want to take a look. Detailed discussions of Chinese literature and censorship slow the narrative, but Chen's insider perspective intrigues. Eventually, prime minister Zhou Enlai helped the couple obtain exit visas to Hong Kong. During the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, Chen and her husband, Jack, a British national, were expelled from their home and placed in a Beijing slum. Chen sheds light on how Zhou Yang's debates with literary critic Hu Feng set off "the first full-fledged campaign of criticism and denunciation of a writer since the Communists had come to power," and recounts the poverty and starvation she encountered when she was sent to villages in Gansu province as part of Mao's land reform initiatives. After the communist takeover in 1949, she took a job as a clerical assistant in the Central Film Bureau in Beijing, where she met culture czar Zhou Yang and other members of Mao's inner circle. Born to prosperous parents in Shanghai in 1929, Chen dreamed of becoming an author. Chen's illuminating account of life in the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party during Chairman Mao Zedong's rule is inspired by her distress over recent crackdowns on protestors in Hong Kong (where Chen now lives) and efforts by the Chinese government to whitewash the violence of the Cultural Revolution.
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