Word: mao
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Taiwan with the retreating KMT, lives very unquietly in neon-struck Taipei. He is president of CTS, one of Taiwan's main TV networks. As boys they were indistinguishable. Now their faces tell very different stories: Peiyuan's face, thin and ravaged, is the story of a China that Mao wrought, with its famines, executions, and harsh labor camps. Peiji's face, fleshy and grinning, is the story of another China, a military dictatorship that became the industrious and democratic society of today's Taiwan...
...story of China over the past 50 years, with all its contradictions, betrayals and unburied ghosts. Confucian thought has always seen the family as a model of the state. Obedience to the father was a model for loyalty to the Emperor. In his quest to create a new China, Mao tried to destroy the family: children informed on parents, ancestral graves were desecrated, meals were eaten in work groups, not at home. But the family survived. As China puts itself together after the ravages of Maoism, the family is one of the few institutions that people believe...
...prosperous landowning family. His father, who had five younger sons and a daughter as well as the twins, ignored all pleas to flee to Hong Kong before the revolution. His attempt to ingratiate himself with the communists by having Peiyuan join up failed. He was executed in 1952 during Mao's anti-landlord campaign, which took perhaps a million lives across China. At that time Peiyuan was with the Chinese army in Korea, fighting the Americans in a war that was to claim nearly 2 million lives, half of them Chinese. His left wrist was shattered by shrapnel. He still...
After the war ended in 1953, he studied in Beijing; then he came back to teach in Changsha. In 1958 he was one of half a million intellectuals who lost their jobs in Mao's anti-rightist campaign. This was the beginning of two decades in the political wilderness for Peiyuan that would culminate in labor camp. "I lost the golden years of my life, from 1958 to 1979," he says...
...Yangs' collision course with history continued. The family home in Liuyang was pulled down in the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s: the peasants wanted the wooden beams for their backyard iron smelters, which Mao thought would transform China into an industrial power. Most of the iron was worthless, and the neglect of agriculture led to the worst famine of the century, in which more than 20 million people starved to death. Peiyuan's "first mother"--his father's first wife--died of hunger in 1962, but the twins' mother--the third wife--survived and held together what...