Word: dai
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...GUARD: THE POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF DAI HSIAO-AI by Gordon A. Bennett and Ronald N. Montaperto. 267 pages. Doubleday...
Viewed from the outside, that vast ideological spasm made little sense. Millions of students were sent mysteriously on the rampage, tormenting innocent people, destroying works of art, defying local Communist authorities. Dai Hsiao-ai was one of those students. His story is neither pleasant nor easy reading. Yet it succeeds far better than anything yet published in transforming that frightening mass of unhinged automatons into boys and girls with human faces. Even before the first ammoniac whiffs of disorder drifted down from Peking in February 1966, the students at Canton's elite Kaochung Middle School, Dai writes, had been...
...first, Dai and his fellow students "struggled"-with posters and speeches-against a few political malfeasants in the distant government. Then the Party Central Committee announced it was necessary to repudiate the bourgeois elements that had "sneaked into the party, the government, the army and all spheres of culture." All at once there were plenty of targets right there in school. The principal singled out two teachers for attack, and the students humiliated the victims to the point of suicide...
...under attack-and collapsed. Looking higher and higher for leadership as each layer of authority was discredited, the students continued to ferret out monsters and argue over the meaning of directives emanating from Peking. Advice to "destroy the Four Olds" (old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits) sent Dai and his friends roaming through Canton, smashing anything that looked faintly bourgeois and changing street names (one group got in a fist fight with another team over whether one street should be East Is Red Road or Pioneer Road). There were minor disappointments ("Old objects became difficult to find, since...
Young women, who three years ago were abandoning their flowing ao dai and silky hair for Western miniskirts and curls, once again dress in the traditional national tunics and wear their hair long. Student leaders, even if they speak good English or French, prefer talking to foreigners in Vietnamese- correcting their translators when necessary. Even the high school students have joined in the fracas. As early as August, they announced a campaign to "abolish corrupted culture" (i.e., American influence) by "boycotting every kind of sex-appeal magazines poisoning the soul of Vietnamese youth," and threatening to "burn...