My Name Is Number 4: A True Story.

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was a pandemic of political extremism and violence. Its scope tends, as man-made cataclysms often do, to overwhelm personal tragedy, to obscure individual faces amidst a nation of victims. Last summer’s celebratory mood surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics did nothing to remind us of the uncounted and nameless bodies just a few feet below the surface of the “new” China that is the only China many Chinese and foreigners know.

Ye Ting-xing’s dramatic recollections provide us with a personal, ground-level view of what the Cultural Revolution meant to a young woman and her family. Ye’s memoir disturbingly details the psychological, social, and political turbulence of this tumultuous decade. Her scathing descriptions Red Guard ferocity and inanity should dispel any lingering affinity with this particularly murderous form of sixties radical chic. As engineers of mass hysteria, the Red Guards terrorized and sometimes murdered hapless individuals whose only crime was a “bad” class pedigree or possession of a family heirloom or book that embodied one of the “Four Olds” targeted for destruction.

By the late 1960s, the Cultural Revolution became more routine, largely in response to escalating infighting between rival Red Guard factions. Ye’s descriptions of what was often open warfare in Shanghai show how close Mao took China to the brink of political calamity. His response was the forced migration of Red Guards and other youth to the countryside—the dreaded xiafang, or “sending down,” that consigned many young, mainly urban Chinese to lives of toil and isolation “serving the revolution.” Ye survived these trials and managed to enter Beijing University in 1974. Studying English, she managed to leave China in 1987.

My Name is Number 4 poignantly shows that present-day China, for all its success, remains a storehouse of nightmares for those who survived the Cultural Revolution.