Red Fire

Wei Yang Chao was fourteen years old when the Cultural Revolution came to his street in Beijing. What followed – the public humiliation of his family, the destruction of his schooling, mass rallies at Tiananmen Square, attacks on teachers and professors, exile – was not history as he would later read about it, but the immediate, bewildering texture of daily life under a regime that had decided to consume itself. Fifty years later, he wrote it down.

Red Fire arrived in English through a translation by Li Guoying, who also translated The Road to Future Art for China Intercontinental Press, and was edited by Jasmin Darznik, the Iranian-American memoirist and novelist. Michael Arnold worked on an early draft of the manuscript, contributing to the process by which Wei Yang Chao’s Chinese-language memoir was shaped into the English-language narrative that Avant Press published in 2017.

The book is the kind of document that the passage of time makes possible but does not make easier to write: a firsthand account of events whose full weight only becomes clear in retrospect, told with the detail of memory and the perspective of someone who eventually made it to the other side. It was reviewed by Kirkus, featured at Left Coast Writers, and is available in its entirety through the Internet Archive.

Wei Yang Chao, devoted husband, dear father of three, and beloved grandfather of two–passed away peacefully on March 9, 2019.

A memoir of this kind does what no historical account can: it puts the reader inside the body of a child who doesn’t yet know how the story ends.

In August 1966, a fourteen-year-old boy in Beijing is thrust into violence and chaos as the Cultural Revolution begins to blaze across China. Red Guards fill the streets. Teachers are publicly humiliated. Families are destroyed by accusation. And at the heart of it, a gentle, observant boy finds himself swept along by forces he cannot stop – watching his family’s world collapse, sent into exile, and slowly learning how to survive a country that has turned against its own.

Red Fire is Wei Yang Chao’s memoir of growing up during one of the most catastrophic political movements in modern history. Written fifty years after the events it describes, it is, as its reviewers have noted, the first intimate English-language account from someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution as a child. Translated from Chinese by Li Guoying and edited by Jasmin Darznik, with early draft editing by Michael Arnold, it is a rare document: a personal history written with the unflinching honesty of memory and the narrative craft of a storyteller who has had decades to understand what he witnessed.

“Something was terribly wrong. I rushed downstairs, only to see my mother approaching with her shoes in her hands. Her feet were bare and she was in obvious pain.”

“Only when we were back home and the door was closed behind us did Mother tell us what had happened: While she was waiting for a bus, a couple of Red Guards came up to her and began angrily accusing her of leading a ‘bourgeois lifestyle.’ Their proof was her high-heeled shoes. The Guards made Mother take them off and then they smashed the heels with their hammers. Her treasure was no more.”

— Wei Yang Chao, Red Fire