Word: peiyuan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...plot is not black and white; despite his ordeals, Peiyuan is more self-assured, more confident of his Chinese identity. His brother Peiji, the eminent achiever, broadcasts insecurity and a trace of guilt at the good life he has enjoyed. Peiyuan is resigned to China's failings. Peiji has indigestion from Taiwan's success. Tell their family story, and you also start to tell the 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...
...family is the most important thing. If you destroy the family, how can society exist?" says Peiyuan, sitting in a car on the road to Yueyang, five hours north of his home in Changsha. This is a journey into the dark past for him. Yueyang is where he was sent to prison in 1969 for 11 years during the Cultural Revolution, accused of being an antirevolutionary rightist. His wife left him because he was politically tainted, taking their three-year-old son with...
...Peiyuan's crime, in the eyes of the communists, was to have been born to a relatively 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...
...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...
...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 was left of the family. They were destitute...