COME WATCH THE SUN GO HOME A Memoir of Upheaval and Revolution in China

Marlowe & Company. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 1998. First Edition. Hardcover. 1569247420 . Ex-library book with usual ex-lib type markings. Pages are clean & tight. Last page has been taped at spine. Jacket has light scuffing & light edge/corner wear. ; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 322 pages; "In the late 1940's, the Chen family gathered for a dusk-time ritual at their hillside home in Berkeley, California to "watch the sun go home" to their native China. Having fled persecution in Chungking during the Sino-Japanese war (1937-45) , the Chens settled briefly in Peking, then escaped to the U. S. During the intensifying civil war. Repatriated and classified as "national bourgeois", they were yet to endure the violence of the Cultural Revolution - separation, imprisonment, internal exile, and "re-education" in the "cadre schools" designed for ideological criminals. Chen Chen was labeled a counter-revolutionary, and after making disparaging remarks about Mao's wife, suffered beating, starvation and solitary confinement with her three-month-old baby. For the next seven years, she was barred from being a musician and writer and assigned to agricultural work. Come Watch the Sun Go Home powerfully evokes the viciousness and absurdity of a society in thrall to totalitarian hysteria and the manifold ironies awaiting Chen upon her "rehabilitation" and return to professional life. While taking part in an educational exchange in the United States in 1989, the author learned of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Chen's condemnation of the regime was broadcast on national television, and she has yet to return to China and her children. This defiant woman's story tells of a life spent in two worlds, one lived in the East and the other in the West; one of prosperity and privilege, one of poverty amid the vicissitudes of history. [635] .