Confessions

<p>This gripping and poignant memoir (<em>New York Times Book Review</em>) draws us into the intersections of everyday life and Communist power from the first days of Liberation in 1949 through the post-Mao era. The son of a professional family Kang Zhengguo is a free spirit drawn to literature. In Mao's China these innocuous circumstances expose him at age twenty to a fierce struggle session expulsion from university and a four-year term of hard labor. So begins his long stay in the prison-camp system. He finally escapes the Chinese gulag by forfeiting his identity: at age twenty-eight he is adopted by an aging bachelor in a peasant village which enables him to start a new life.</p>