My Homeless Generations

This is the true story of Wu Qianxi. Born in Beijing, she spent her first five years with a loving Aunt at a rural village in Hebei Providence, China, until her father took her back to an academy of the People's Liberation Army. She then lived there as a "stranger in a strange land" until the Cultural Revolution came and replaced education with "re-education." In that chaos Wu Qianxi found freedom and became a self-made Red Guard. But when her father was criticized, her world collapsed - he was an editor of the Workers' Press of China and had tried to publish the book entitled Liu Zhidan, which Mao Zedong thought offensive - and to survive, our hero fell back upon the values of the village where she had been nurtured. This is her story, told from that girl's point of view, first with a peasant family, then with her elite parents in Beijing, and finally at a hospital in China's remote northeast where she worked as a sixteen-year-old surgical nurse.