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A first-hand account of what life was like in the period before the revolution and in Mao's reign, China was a vast human drama, as real people confronted, not political abstractions, but concrete, real challenges, often involving life and death, and she was a witness to the choices, the ways people behaved, in that situation.
The Secret Listener gives a unique perspective on the era. Yuan-tsung Chen, who is now 90, and lived through most of it offers a vantage point that provides us with a new, wider perspective on the Maoist regime, one of the most radical political experiments in modern history and a force that genuinely changed the world.
List of contents
- Opening Shot
- The First Part: Before the Year of 1949
- Chapter 1 : My Family and Myself
- Chapter 2 : My First Beau
- Chapter 3 : The Broadening of My Horizon
- Chapter 4 : Stumbling into a Larger World
- The Second Part: After the Year of 1949
- Chapter 5 : In Mao's Beijing
- Chapter 6 : Outside the Great Wall, By the Blue Danube
- Chapter 7 : I Felt It Was Me on Trial
- Chapter 8 : A Purge in Reverse
- Chapter 9 : A Reverse of the Reverse: The Anti-Rightists Purge
- The Third Part: The Great Leap Forward
- Chapter 10: A Leap from the Magical Circle into Mao's Great Famine
- Chapter 11: A VIP Pig
- Chapter 12: From Black Market to Fake Bumper Harvest
- Chapter 13: Between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
- The Fourth Part: The Cultural Revolution
- Chapter 14: The Mob Rule
- Chapter 15: The Mob Rule Continued
- Chapter 16: Intrigues in a Slum House
- Chapter 17: Forced into Exile and Fought back
- Epilogue
About the author
Yuan-tsung Chen is a former official under Mao in the 1950s. She is also the author of the novel The Dragon's Village and a winning survivor from Maoism.
Additional text
Chen Yuan-Tsung's memoir project should not be understood as an objective, universal account of the events that marked China's history in the past century. However, her direct experiences of the internal and public implementation of political campaigns constitutes a rare and important account. The Secret Listener, finally, is a reminder of the importance of preserving personal memories and witnesses in the face of historical rewriting: 'I am now ninety, looking back on an eventful life, disturbed that so much of what I witnessed has been dropped down the sanitizing memory hole of the Chinese propaganda machine'.
