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This memoir leaves the reader questioning the author's character. A bright young Chinese boy from a privileged land owning family goes to Harvard, returns to China and becomes an English-Chinese interpreter to the leaders of the communist political movement.
His family is well connected to many Chinese political leaders. The boy studied, and then left Harvard serve them. The book relates his entire career and seems gloss over or overlook the political excesses of Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai. The reader continually is left to question how this could have happened. This memoir leaves the reader questioning the author's character. A bright young Chinese boy from a privileged land owning family goes to Harvard, returns to China and becomes an English-Chinese interpreter to the leaders of the communist political movement.
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Millions of his own people were being killed by the communist regime. He states the fact but immediately moves on. He apparently bought the communist line without questioning. For a self diagnosed superior intelligence, the book shows him as not very smart after all.
A few quotations from the book:
A few quotations from the book:
- "Although atrocities had been committed by both sides, it was Chaing (Kai Shek) who committed the true atrocities" . . . and ordered that communists "be rounded up and executed in a grisly fashion. Some had been thrown into locomotive furnaces to be burned alive."
. - ". . .MacArthur, the most hawkish, high ranking, and reckless officer in the American military. . ."
. - "Truman had already shown his treachery by breaking his promise not to interfere with China's planned invasion of Taiwan. . ."
. - "After five thousand years of Chinese culture, the warmongers among America's political leaders regarded us as nothing more than ignorant laundrymen."
. - "MacArthur was agitating for the use of atomic bombs on targets along the China-North Korean border."
. - ". . MacArthur wanted to throw five hundred thousand Kuomintang troops at our People's Volunteers."
. - "China was fighting a war (Korea)it didn't want and could ill afford, provoked by the North Koreans, who had been egged on by the Soviets, who were supposed to be China's ally."
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- ". . . paying back the huge debts the Soviet Union forced us to pay for accepting their weapons during the Korean War had produced a famine of historic proportions. There would be 30 million fewer of those poor, blank Chinese."
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- "The vote was 368 to 2. The U.N. was dominated by the Americans, so a quarter of the earth's population would remain voiceless. Meanwhile, the corrupt Taiwan regime was allowed to represent the Chinese people at the United Nations."
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- Because of famine China's "total population in 1960 dropped by 10 million over the previous year."
- From August 1966 to September 1976. . "millions died, and for every person who died an untold number suffered in some way. Like the European Holocaust of World War II, the Cultural Revolution was so horrific and irrational that people all over the globe wonder how it could have happened. So do we Chinese."
