Red Land Yellow River: A Story from the Cultural Revolution

In this moving autobiographical picture book for older children, Chinese-Canadian artist and book illustrator Ange Zhang tells the story of his teenage involvement in China's Cultural Revolution. The son of a famous Chinese writer, Zhang grew up in a comfortable Beijing home with his extended family. When the Red Guards first infiltrate his school in 1966, he feels only pride, for both his parents are high-ranking officials in the Communist Party and helped bring Chairman Mao to power. But before long, he witnesses his father's public humiliation as an intellectual and finds himself blackballed from joining the Red Guards with the rest of his friends because he is one of the "bad guys."

In simple yet unflinchingly direct prose, Zhang describes how these injustices did nothing to dampen his fervour for Mao's revolution. To his mother's unspoken horror, he forms his own one-person unit of the Guards, shaving his head and arming himself against other rebel groups. "All I wanted," he recalls, "was to be just like the other kids, to wear the olive green uniform with the red armband." It is not until he climbs to the top of his house one day and gazes over the tiled roofs of Beijing, that he begins to see his way as an artist and an individual. Illustrated with lush digitally rendered pictures of everyday life during the Cultural Revolution, along with family photographs, Red Land, Yellow River delivers a poignant reminder about the essential vulnerability of youth. A fine appendix expands the historical context. --Lisa Alward