Opening Shot
Yuan-tsung Chen writes her memoir in the midst of growing unrest when in 2019 the Communist rulers try to pass an extradition law in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. To begin with, they set about “reforming” middle schoolers’ education— for instance, through the Orwellian rewriting of the history of the Cultural Revolution, from the ten-year-long “cataclysm” (Hao Jie—浩劫) to the ten years of “arduous exploration and development achievement.” Even according to the official death toll, 1.7 million people perished in the Cultural Revolution. The dead had families or relatives, friends or lovers, so how many more lives were ruined? Yuan-tsung simply cannot accept such a whitewashing without a guilty conscience. She is fully aware of the consequences of confronting the untruth. Nevertheless, she decides to write what she witnessed, saw, and understood as truth.