cover image A Generation Lost: China Under the Cultural Revolution

A Generation Lost: China Under the Cultural Revolution

Zi-Ping Luo. Henry Holt & Company, $22 (342pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-0957-6

As the Cultural Revolution overtook China in 1966, Luo's parents were branded anti-revolutionaries. She watched Red Guards drag her father through the streets to be kicked and spat upon; he died after 12 years of house arrest. Her mother was sent to a labor camp, where she died in 1979. In deceptively simple prose, Luo, a physical chemist at California Polytechnic, describes her family's agony, how she cared for her three siblings in Shanghai and narrowly avoided forcible relocation to the countryside. Cast mainly in the form of letters to a professor in China, her autobiography is a cry from the heart, a tragic family drama that mirrors the dislocation of a generation. (Feb.)