Last night, I attended a semi formal dinner with my friend from Shanghai and had the privilege of meeting his parents. His mother did not speak any English but his father had little problem as he is a well educated man. One of the things we talked about was the Cultural Revolution. At this time, he was only 26 years old and the Chinese ambassador to several Nordic countries. He left China prior to the revolution but was ordered to return during the beginning. Having little idea of what was going on, he bought several bicycles home as gifts for his family. When he returned, he was screamed at for not being a true Chinese, beaten, tortured and went through many forms of anti-human treatment. The bicycles, as well as most of what was left of his home were destroyed. He met his wife at that time, and as she was just a common Chinese lady he was allowed to marry her as part of his re-education. He said that if it were not for her, he would have eventually "disappeared". Now he is 79 years old, happy and full of life. They have been married for about 50 years and you can tell that they are still deeply in love. I decided to write this as a reminder of how nice it is to be an American, and although we do have problems from time to time, we never had to suffer this sort of revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution The picture is of a ceramic tea container that his parents presented to me.
What a story. To be treated an alien to your country is very painful considering that he was a government official and an ambassador to Norway. I guess this is not the 1949 cultural revolution when the communists of Mao Tse Tung (Mao Ze Dong now) overthrew the Kuomintang of Chang Kai Shek. That was a military revolution. Maybe that cultural revolution was in the late 1960s or early 1970s. I had read a story about a British woman executive of Shell who was trapped inside China. She related the attitudes of the young soldiers who were attired in red coats. The woman was treated like a criminal and her belongings were confiscated. Not content, the soldiers left her a warning not to think of escaping because people like her (belonging the class of the capitalists) will be tried in court. That's a nasty chapter in the history of modern China.