Son of the Revolution

Liang’s father, Liang Shan, is a passionate intellectual and reporter, editor, and cofounder of the Hunan Daily Communist newspaper. At the opening of the memoir, Father wants nothing more than to become a Party member and retains a stalwart belief that “the Party could never make a mistake or hand down a wrong verdict” (9). He even chooses the Party over his wife, divorcing her when she’s condemned as an anti-Party Rightist.

Father’s faith in the Party is tested during the Cultural Revolution, when he is denounced as a capitalist-sympathizing intellectual, loses his job, suffers public humiliation, and is forced to undergo prolonged re-education. Father disapproves of the Revolution’s destruction of traditional Chinese culture and is heartbroken when the Red Guards burn his books, but he still believes in the Party principles, and when he’s sent to the countryside to share Communist doctrine with the peasants, he becomes “more at peace with himself and the world than [Liang] had ever seen him” (177). 

However, Father’s true empathy for the peasants causes him to finally break with Communist doctrine, as he can’t sanction Revolutionary measures that hurt these already deeply-impoverished people. His unquestioning faith in the Party now failing, Father’s health begins to fail as well, and despite a brief bright spot where he works as a writer again, he suffers a stroke and must retire. Father’s final consolation is to see his son carry on his own passion for literature and knowledge, and to know that all three of his children are married and have “found peace” (286).

When Liang is born, his mother is a cadre in the Changsha Public Security Bureau, as devoted to the Party as her husband is; Liang describes her as “a strong-willed person who like[s] to express her opinions, and a loving mother when she [has] the time” (6). However, as part of the Hundred Flowers Movement, Mother feels obligated to criticize her leaders at work, an act that haunts her for her entire life. She is sent away for labor reform, and despite her valiant efforts to shake off her “Rightist’s ‘cap,’” she never manages to do so (9). She is forced into a divorce, and though she fights to keep at least one child, she loses all three.

Her new husband, Uncle Lei, is a “real intellectual” (165) who has also suffered from party politics and teaches her to keep quiet and avoid trouble. This makes her a “changed woman,”no longer full of “energetic determination,” but instead “something tiny and timid” (166). Like Liang’s father, his mother has been disappointed by the events of the Revolution; yet also like Father, Liang’s mother has the consolation of seeing her son married to an American and able to enjoy new opportunities.

Liang Fang is Liang’s eldest sister and the one he most admires. She is “brilliantly intelligent” and determined to become a Party member, stoically denying her own emotional attachments in her devotion to the Revolution (37). In her journal, she describes visiting her mother as a “weakness” and hope to “renounce all family ties and let the Party be her true father and mother” (38). For much of the book, Liang Fang is “off making Revolution somewhere,” even becoming a Red Guard, and Lang idolizes her and accompanies her on the New Long March (59).

By the time Liang Fang becomes part of the movement to send Educated Youth to the countryside, she “regret[s] the violence and excesses to which she had contributed” (143). However, she still believes in the principles of socialism and retains her hard-working, self-sacrificing nature, and thus volunteers to be placed in a particularly poor area. She eventually leaves the countryside to teach in a primary school and marries a student in a workers’ university.

As the middle sibling of the Liang family, Liang Wei-ping is more domestic and less political than her elder sister, Liang Fang. Liang Wei-ping has a clear desire to take care of her family: she mends Father’s shirts to bring to him while he’s away for Thought Study, and when she must go to the countryside and leave Liang alone, she cleans the entire house, “even scrubb[ing] the walls” (146), and reinforces Liang’s clothes in places they might tear. She takes a photo of the family with her when she goes and leaves behind a note for Father reading, “I love you. I miss you” (147).

Life among the peasants, who resent the Educated Youth’s presence, is a “terrifying whirlpool” for her (200). Eventually, Liang Wei-ping is able to go to a small teachers’ college, where she is asked to stay and manage the chemistry laboratory, and she marries a hydroelectric engineer. Like her siblings, Liang Wei-ping has finally “found peace” (286).

Peng Ming, Liang’s neighbor, is about eight years older than Liang, and a “hero” (102) to both Liang and his sisters. As a “confident, determined, brilliant” young man (102), Peng Ming naturally becomes a leader among the Revolutionary Rebels, both as a Red Guard guiding Liang’s team on the New Long March and as a student at the Central Institute of Music in Peking. Liang briefly stays with Peng Ming in Peking, where Peng Ming is so devoted to the Revolution that he “[does] everything with bloodshot eyes in an aura of emergency” (116). When Liang wonders why Peng Ming drives himself to such a state, Peng Ming says he “want[s] to collect experience” and “develop” himself (118). His words inspire Liang to do the same, and in fact Liang becomes a “collector of experiences” throughout the memoir.

Little Gao, a conductress Liang meets on the train to Shanghai, is Liang’s first serious love. Liang is first drawn to her “selflessness” (245), as she is working tirelessly to help another passenger. Liang appreciates the fact that she doesn’t distinguish between a “‘good’ and ‘bad’ background” (251), but her high-ranking father doesn’t share her opinion and demands his daughter stop seeing Liang, a factory worker and son of an intellectual. Little Gao does quite a bit for Liang, using her connections to open a “back door” into college for Liang, but after her father's denunciation, the two gradually grow apart. For Liang, the sad ending of this relationship represents yet another instance when “the old trap” of his tainted background destroys a chance at happiness (261).