Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai (2011)

Inside Out & Back Again is the chronicle of  a ten year old Vietnamese girl during 1975. Hà, her mother and her three older brothers live in Saigon. Her parents had come south just before the borders between North and South Vietnam had closed. Her father had been in the navy and was captured by the Communists while on a mission. It wasn’t known if he was dead or alive.
One day their father’s best friend, Uncle Son, visited them and said he could get them out of the country. The alley outside their back door would allow them to bypass the navy checkpoint and give them access to the port.

'I will not risk
fleeing with my children
on a rickety boat.

Would a navy ship
meet your approval?

As if the navy
would abandon its country?

There won’t be a South Vietnam
left to abandon.

You really believe
we can leave?

When the time comes,
this house is our bridge
to the sea.'

Two of Hà’s brothers don’t want to leave the country but their mother had lived in the North. She knew that her son at college would eventually be asked to leave; her younger son would come home from school chanting the slogans of Hồ Chí Minh and be rewarded for reporting everything that was said in the home to his teacher.

The family destroyed everything at home that could be used as evidence against their father and taking only necessary items, they boarded a ship. Two weeks later while they were at sea, there was a formal lowering of their flag as the commander announced that South Vietnam no longer existed.

Although Inside Out & Back Again is a work of fiction, it is based on the author’s own experience as a Vietnamese refugee. It is written in free form verse in short, crisp, ‘visual’ phrases which reflect the sound of the Vietnamese language. (Hà would have been thinking in Vietnamese and not English.)
I think the free verse works very well for this book. My teacher daughter gave me this book to read and said that she read it aloud to her 6th Grade class at school when studying immigration. The family in this book eventually settled in Alabama in the USA, as did the author, but their experiences, in many ways, mirror those of refugees who came to Australia.
Here are some ideas my daughter used with this book:

*  Mapped out Ha’s journey

*  Looked at literal and figurative language and used this to help us discuss the culture shock for the main character

*  Discussed what it would be like to view things that are normal to us from the perspective of someone seeing them for the first time (took photos of the classroom, what do you think your first impression would be?)

*  Annotated poems from the book

*  Performed poems

*  Wrote our own free verse poems

*  Looked at the history - push and pull factors of migration

*  Discussed racism and how people often treat people who are unfamiliar or “other” badly or dismiss them as inferior. How does this affect the main characters experiences? How might her experiences have been different without these attitudes?

Inside Out & Back Again was a 2012 Newbery Honor Book and is a very accessible book for younger readers to introduce them to the Vietnam War, immigration and free form poetry. Recommended for ages 9 to 12 years of age but interesting for older readers also.

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki (1943 - 1948)

Set in Japan on the eve of World War II, The Makioka Sisters has been described as the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century. Not having read many Japanese novels I’m not in a position to agree or disagree with that observation, but it is certainly a compelling and poignant picture of an upper-class Japanese society in decline.

The four Makioka sisters belong to an aristocratic family whose parents are no longer alive. The two eldest, Tsuruko and Sachicko are married and Tsuruko’s husband, Tatsuo, has taken on the Makioka family name and with that responsibility for the unmarried sisters.
Yukiko and Taeko prefer living with Sachicko and her husband in Osaka while the eldest sister and her family make their home in the ‘main house’ in Tokyo, which causes tension at times.

Yukiko, the third daughter, has turned down numerous marriage proposals over the years and the family has acquired a reputation for being too haughty. With the family fortunes in decline and Yukiko now in her early thirties, their expectations are beginning to be more realistic.

‘It was strange that whenever talk came up of a husband for Yukiko, some really insurmountable difficulty always presented itself. Yukiko seemed to be unmarriageable, and Tsuruko found it hard to shrug off as only a superstition the belief that women born in the Year of the Ram had trouble finding husbands.’

The youngest sister, Taeko, is rebellious and modern in her views but has to wait until Yukiko is married before she can entertain the idea of marriage herself. Meanwhile, she doesn’t let that stop her from throwing herself into scandalous situations.
Up until the end of World War II, Japanese men and women were introduced to each via a matchmaker. This could be a relative or a another third party who arranged a ‘miai’ where the two potential spouses met over a formal meal in the company of some family members and the matchmaker. They were also given the opportunity to spend some time conversing on their own.
The two parties investigated each other’s backgrounds using a detective agency to check there were no skeletons in the closets or problems such as insanity or hereditary issues in the family, so the Makioka’s were always afraid that Taeko’s indiscretions might surface and put an end to negotiations.

This book is a quiet and delicate immersion in Japanese culture, from cherry blossom festivals and kabuki theatre, to family traditions and cultural beliefs.

Kabuki Theatre

Embed from Getty Images


The author started writing the story as a series during World War II and the events of The Makioka Sisters take place between 1936 and 1941 as Japan was building up its military presence in the area.
The Makioka family seem to live in a bubble while their culture is disintegrating around them but from time to time hints about what was going on in the outside world break into the story: ‘the national crisis,’ ‘the China Incident,' and ‘National Spiritual Mobilization,' for example.

The Osaka sisters became quite close to the Stolz family, a German couple and their three children living next door to them, and when the family returned to Germany, letters were exchanged. They reveal some of what was taking place over there in 1941, the attitude of the people to the war, and the false security they felt about the outcome.

‘As you know, there is a shortage of manpower in Germany, and it is very difficult to find a maid...Once I had time to write letters in the evening. Now I must get out a basket of stockings, all with big and little holes in them. In the old days I would have thrown away worn-out stockings, but now we must economise. We must work together to win through, and each of us must do his part, however small it may be. I understand that life is harder in Japan too...
But we must bear the burden. We are both young nations fighting our way up, and it is not easy to win a place in the sun. And yet I do believe that we will win in the end...When we win our victory and everything is normal again, you can visit Germany.'

This is an unusual and very interesting perspective.
The Makioka Sisters is beautifully written and has stood up well in translation into English while retaining an authentic Japanese flavour.
530 pages; would suit an upper high school student studying Modern History, or Ambleside Online Year 11 if you wanted to include a literary book from an Asian perspective in an Australian curriculum.


Linking to 2019 Back to the Classics: A Classic From Africa, Asia, or Oceania.

Green Dolphin Country by Elizabeth Goudge (1944)

Earlier this year I was introduced to Elizabeth Goudge through her book The Rosemary Tree and after reading that I knew that I’d read more by her. I ordered Green Dolphin Country because a good friend recommended it but I was surprised when it arrived that it contained 743 pages. I don’t usually commit to a book of that length unless it’s a Russian classic or a Norwegian saga because I don’t think there are many authors who have the skill to weave a story over that many pages without losing the plot and the reader.

However, once I’d bought the book I decided to read it and ended up enjoying it very much. Goudge certainly doesn’t write like a Russian novelist or a Norwegian saga writer but she is an expert delineator of character.

Green Dolphin Country is a work of fiction but it was based on an actual event. The story begins on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel where we meet the three main characters. It continues in New Zealand with details of the lives of two of those characters, alternating with scenes from the life of the one left behind. It ends with the meeting of all three again back in Guernsey in their latter years.
The personalities who populate this story are rendered in such a way that they become real. We see how the three main characters develop and change over the course of their lives. Goudge's insights into humanity with its weaknesses and strengths, fears and hopes, is skilful and infused with humour.
To me, this story was in essence a tale of love and disappointment; of choosing to love and acting on that choice when there was no corresponding feeling of love; of kindness and humility, of finding a way to make things work when there seems to be no way.

Some highlights

On the one who always wanted to be in control:

It was no good waiting on fortune. Her favour was inscrutable and uncertain. What one wanted one must get for oneself. A man could use his will like a sword but a woman had mostly to use hers like a shuttle.

...for the first time in her life she had taken her hand off the tiller and was waiting patiently for something beyond herself to take her in charge.

The worst thing about sin was that its punishment could not be borne by the sinner alone. Why did one not realise that before it was too late?

Goudge has a knack of illuminating ordinary things and highlighting hope. One of my favourite passages is this one about the unseen aspects of prayer:

There were days when the impossibility of seeing the result of one’s prayer was disheartening almost to the point of faithlessness. One prayed for those in peril, but though one might seem to hear the beating of wings in the wind the eyes of the body could not see the angel who took the prayer from one’s outstretched hands, held it as a shield between some human creature and the death that it was not yet the will of God should come upon them. One prayed for courage for those who had turned back upon the path, that they might turn again, but one’s own body did not experience the shock of realisation, the reversal, the gathering of strength. One prayed for the faithless but it was not granted to one’s ears to hear the crumbling of the walls and the shouting of the trumpet and the ‘I believe...’

There might be utter humiliation but that’s not the end of the story.

The sort of love he had given her, deliberately created, not drawn irresistibly forth by the loveliness of the beloved, implies no merit in the object of it and was not worth having. No, she had nothing - nothing.

She was too humiliated just at present to dare think that the virtue of humility might one day be her own.

How desperately hard it must have been for him. What a price he must have paid for her salvation! That was what love was - a paying of the price.

This is a very redemptive type of story and I love it for that fact alone.


Linking to Back to the Classics 2018: Classic with a Color in the Title

Christian Classics: By Searching by Isobel Kuhn (1901-1957)

“To every man there openeth
A way, and ways, and a way,
And the high soul climbs the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low,
And in between, on the misty flats,
To rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth
A high way, and a low.
And every man decideth
The way his soul shall go.” 

John Oxenham

Isobel Kuhn and her husband, John spent twenty years working amongst the Lisu tribe, a minority people group, in South-West China. The Communist occupation of China forced them to leave China in 1950 and to enter Thailand to work with the Lisu people there.
Isobel wrote about her experiences with the Lisu people and the Communist take over in some of her other books: Ascent to the Tribes, Nests Above the Abyss, and In the Arena. By Searching is the story of her girlhood and the years before her marriage up until she sailed for China in 1928.

Isobel was brought up in an ‘earnest Presbyterian home,’ and had been carefully prepared by her parents to refute modernism before she was allowed to enter university. However, she had a crisis of faith after a highly regarded university professor told his students that the only reason they believed in God, Heaven and Hell, was because their parents brought them up that way.

‘Our twentieth century believed only when there was a test and a proof. We were scientific in our investigations; we did not swallow the superstitions of our ancestors just because 

they were handed to us.’

Although she understood the conflicting claims of modernity and fundamentalism, Isobel was unprepared to explain why she believed what she did. She came to the conclusion that she would accept no theories of life which she had not proved personally:

And, quite ignorant of where that attitude would lead me, I had unconsciously stepped off the High Way where man walks with his face lifted Godward and the pure, piney scents of the Heights call him upward, on to ‘the misty flats.’ The in-between level place of easy-going; nothing very good attempted, yet nothing bad either; where men walk in the mist telling each other that no one can see these things clearly. The misty flats where the in-between drift to and fro; life has no end but amusement and no purpose; where the herd drift with the strongest pull and there is no reason for opposing anything. Therefore they had a kind of peace and a mutual link which they call tolerance.

This is a great book for Christian young people as the author is honest and transparent about her life during her time on the ‘misty flats.'  By rejecting the foundation laid in her life as a child, she had no objective standard for truth and no basis for making the right choices. She describes her struggles with relationships, including a broken engagement with a young man who has no intention of remaining faithful once they were married. Her weaknesses, financial difficulties, and her search for a purpose to her life are winsomely described, as is her quest to find God by seeking Him with all her heart. Her abandonment of her childhood faith was especially painful for her father. To those parents who are going through this with their own child, Isobel's journey would be an encouragement that a parent's prayers are not only important, but effective.

One of the memorable incidents in the book occurred when the author was twenty years of age. She had just broken up with her fiancée, had trouble sleeping and her father was concerned for her. One night he knelt by her bed and prayed to God to help her but it just irritated her:

“Thanks, Dad,” I said wearily, “I know you mean well, but it doesn’t go beyond the ceiling, you know,” and I never forgot the groan with which he turned from my agnosticism and left the room.

One night, not long after this episode, she describes how ‘the Tempter came’ and convinced her that life had no purpose and she might as well slip out of it. She was on her way to the bathroom to ingest a poison when she heard her Dad moan in his sleep and she was startled into remembering how much he loved her and how devastated he’d be if she committed suicide:

In agony I turned and sat down on the edge of my bed and faced the darkest moment of my life. I didn’t want to live and I couldn’t die!

Interestingly, the professor who had ‘first pushed her off the High Way' had given his students an essay to study which included quotations of poetry from the classics. One of these was from Dante which was written in Latin. Isobel had studied Latin and translated it as ‘In His will is our peace.’

Now that sentence wrote itself across the dark of my bedroom. Dante believed in God. What if there were a God, after all? If so, I certainly had not been in His will. Maybe that was why I had no peace?

And so her search for God began.

I read this book as a fairly new Christian and I was very impressed with the author’s candid way of writing. Simply told but profound in many ways, it hasn’t lost its relevance in the sixty years since it was written. I’d recommend it for about age 14/15 years and up. I'm using it in Term 2 of Ambleside Online Year 8. Update: I decided to leave it until Year 10, which is this year (2020) and it's been a good fit for my 15 yr old daughter.
A true Christian classic.

The Reading Life of a 13 Year Old Girl

For those of you with book gobblers, you know how difficult it can be to keep up with their reading habits. I'm constantly asked the question, "Do you have any books I can read?" I have shelves and rooms full of books but they're not always age appropriate, and sometimes I can't believe how fast my 13 year old girl reads. But I shouldn't really be surprised as one of her older sisters was also a ridiculously fast reader. Sometimes I tell her to re-read something and she often does, multiple times. These are some of her recent new titles, plus some of her re-reads.

The Gauntlet by Ronald Welch (1951)

'As Peter wanders around the ruined castle of Carreg Cennen he makes an amazing discovery - a rusted metal gauntlet. As he slips it on to his hand he is transported back to the fourteenth century, to a time when his Norman ancestors held the castle.
Accepted as the eldest son of Sir Roger de Blois, Peter learns how to hawk, fight, and shoot a longbow - but when a rebellion arises, it's up to Peter to escape from the besieged castle and fetch help.'

This was one of my husband's favourite books as a young teen and all of our children have enjoyed it. A re-read for Moozle & one of her favourite books.

There's No Escape by Ian Serraillier (1950)

A thrilling and sometimes humorous adventure set in war time Europe in the fictional country of Silvania. Peter Howarth is parachuted into enemy territory in order to find and rescue the brilliant scientist, Dr Helpmann, before the enemy catches him and forces him to reveal his important discoveries. A re-read and highly recommended for ages 10 years and up. Moozle has read this multiple times.

The Samurai's Tale by Eric Christian Haugaard (1984)

Set in turbulent 16th Century Japan when powerful warlords fought for supremacy. Haugaard is a skilful writer who captures the feel of the times.

'I shall begin my tale on that day when I lost not only my father, but my mother and my two older brothers as well. A storm swept our land and when it passed I was the only survivor of my family. In the morning of that day my name had been Murakami; I was a bushi, a knight's son whom every woman in the village would fondle and spoil. Before the sun set I had been given the name "Taro," a servant's name, and I was of no more importance than that name implied.'

I'd recommend this book for confident readers about age 13 years and up who are interested in history. There is a profusion of Japanese names which some readers might find confusing and it is a bit brutal in places, which isn't surprising considering the time period.
This was the first time Moozle read this book.

Sir Nigel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1906)

Although Conan Doyle is best known for his Sherlock Holmes' character, he has a good number of historical fiction titles that aren't as well-known & they are all excellent. Sir Nigel is a swashbuckling knight errant in the service of Edward lll, who goes looking for honour and renown to gain the hand of his lady-love, who waits patiently in England.
Sir Nigel, although written at a later date, is the prequel to the The White Company, which recounts the adventures of Alleyne Edricson, who is in the service of the middle-aged and married Sir Nigel.
This gets re-read fairly frequently.

Mr Fitton at the Helm (1998) & Mr Fitton's Hurricane (2000) by Showell Styles

Information about this author may be found here. Both books are set in the early 1800's, are based on an actual Naval officer and are historically accurate. I picked these two books up secondhand & got my husband to preview them before I handed them over to Moozle. She enjoyed them & would like to read others in the series. Both these books are suitable for about age 12 years and up.

Flying Aces of World War I by Gene Gurney (1965)

This is a re-read & we've had this book for many years. If you can find a copy, it's a great read for anyone interested in WWI and flying. If your children like Biggles, they'll be happy with this book. My children loved anything like this and if the interest is there this book is really suitable for any age.

The King's Fifth by Scott O'Dell (1966)

A Newbery Honor book set in the time of the Conquistadors. O'Dell writes well but his books are often a little dark and sad, so it's probably good to give them a quick preview to see if they are suitable for your child. First time reading.

The Snow Smugglers by Patrick Pringle (1939)

This is a book I picked up secondhand recently. It's a good adventure story especially for boys (8 years and up) who are reluctant readers, and while Moozle read it and didn't mind it, it was a bit too predictable plot-wise for her. Two young lads, Geoffrey and Keith are on a school excursion in Paris. Geoffrey's father is a secret agent, and unbeknownst to the boys, they are being watched by members of a drug cartel who plan to kidnap them in order to get their hands on Geoffrey's father who is on their trail. I like how the boys are portrayed, and if I'd come across this book when my boys were younger, I'm sure they would have enjoyed it.

Mistress Pat by L.M. Montgomery (1938)

Up until reading Mistress Pat, Moozle had enjoyed every other book this author has written, but this one was a disappointment. From what I can gather, the previous 'Pat of Silver Bush,' is a much better story than its sequel. Moozle's opinion of Mistress Pat:

'Pretty boring. They just sat around and gossiped all day and never did anything.' 
Just as well it only cost me a dollar.

The Lord of the Rings by J. R.R.Tolkien

We bought this beautiful boxed set in the Folio Society Christmas sale and Moozle devoured all three books in about a week. She hasn't watched the movies and probably won't until she's a bit older. At the end of next year her Orchestra will be performing the music at the cinema while the movie is screened. They did this awhile ago before she joined the Symphony & it was a huge success.

The Young Victoria

Not a book, but we watched this movie the other night and afterwards ended up delving into British History & Queen Victoria's reign. It's rated PG and I'd recommend it for about age 13 years and up. It is a lovely movie that looks at court intrigue and the machinations of government and politics in the lead up to Victoria's ascent to the throne and her marriage to Albert.

First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung (2000)

Loung Ung was five years old when the Khmer Rouge army took over the city of Phnom Penh in April 1975. Her father had been a high ranking official in the previous government so when the Marxist regime came to power he had to flee from the city to the countryside with his wife and seven children in order to hide his identity. His former position as a government official rendered him ‘morally corrupt,’ while his Chinese born wife was considered ‘racially corrupt.’

First They Killed My Father is an eloquent and harrowing story of survival seen through the eyes of a young child.
For the first couple of chapters Loung’s narrative is mostly concerned with her upbringing, family background, and their life as a middle class family living in the city. Loung is a spunky, precocious child and she sees her world through the eyes of such a child. The innocence and naïveté of her perspective is at first disarming, but as her story progresses and she becomes a witness and a victim of unthinkable atrocities, it is almost surreal. How could a child possibly go through such trauma and survive?
Yet she did, as did other children, but at what a cost!
Loung writes as a ‘daughter of Cambodia’ and records details of her life under the Khmer Rouge that includes the loss of half of her immediate family, her time as a child soldier and a graphic account of an attempted rape upon her when she was about 8 or 9 years old.

Loung’s older brothers were taken to labour camps and later her sister, Keav, was sent to a teen work camp. Six months later after contracting dysentery, Keav died before her parents could get to see her. When they asked if they could take her body home they were told that her body had been thrown out because they needed the bed for the next patient.
One day two soldiers came for her father and he was taken away under the pretext that his help was needed to move a wagon stuck in the mud. He never returned.

...we all know that what we feared most has happened. Keav, and now Pa, one by one, the Khmer Rouge is killing my family. My stomach hurts so much I want to cut it open and take the poison out...
“Chou,” I whisper to my sister, “I’m going to kill Pol Pot. I hate him and I want to make sure he dies a slow and painful death.”
I do not know what he looks like, but if Pol Pot is the leader of the Angkar then he is the one responsible for all the miseries in our lives...I am a kid, not even seven years old, but somehow I will kill Pol Pot...
I despise Pol Pot for making me hate so deeply. My hate overpowers and scares me, for with hate in my heart I have no room for sadness. Sadness makes me want to die inside...Rage makes me want to survive and live so that I may kill. 

There were some striking similarities between this book and Life and Death in Shanghai which I read last year, although Cambodia’s situation was unique in that the regime swept in almost overnight and squeezed their atrocities into such a short window of time. An estimated two million Cambodians were systematically killed between 1975 and 1979. I remember reading that the odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot's rule was slightly over 2 to 1. Considering how young Loung Ung was it’s incredible that she survived at all.
Some of the similarities I found were:

•    the Utopian dream of a classless society, which of course never eventuates because power goes hand in hand with corruption, and envy is never satisfied

When I ask Kim (Loung’s 10 year old brother) what a capitalist is, he tells me it is someone who is from the city. He says the Khmer Rouge government views science, technology, and anything mechanical as evil and therefore must be destroyed. The Angkor says the ownership of cars and electronics such as watches, clocks, and televisions created a deep class division between the rich and the poor...These devices have been imported from foreign countries and are thus contaminated...
Imports are defined as evil because they allowed foreign countries a way to invade Cambodia, not just physically but also culturally. So now these goods are abolished..

•    the harnessing of the youth to spread intimidation along with the loss of respect for older people. Traditionally Asian societies have a reverence for the aged so this was huge shift for both societies

•    Disdain for the educated; utilitarianism; no place for the disabled - and there were plenty of disabled people in Kampuchea as a result of the extensive use of landmines by the regime

'In the new agrarian society, there is no place for disabled people.'

Without taking her pulse or touching her, the nurse asks Keav a few brief questions and hurries away, saying she will return later to check on her and bring some medicine. Keav knows this is a lie. There is no medicine. There are no real doctor sort nurses, only ordinary people ordered to pretend to be medical experts. All the real doctors and nurses were killed by the Angkar long ago.

•    Changing the meaning of common language, rewriting history & the destruction of historical markers e.g.  antiquities, historical sites, cultural expressions

•    Cult of personality - both Mao & Pol Pot were treated as gods


The Khmer Rouge government also bans the practice of religion. Kim says the Angkar do not want people worshipping any gods or goddesses that might take away devotion to the Angkar.

•    Breakdown of family structures and religion

“In Democratic Kampuchea,” the chief continues, “we are all equal and do not have to cower to anyone. When the foreigners took over Kampuchea, they brought with the bad habits and fancy titles. The Angkor has expelled all foreigners so we no longer have to refer to each other using fancy titles...the children will change what they call their parents...”


•    Propaganda, terror, forced labour, hopelessness

 In a Khmer Rouge hospital, people moaned and whimpered in pain, but did not scream. Here at the hospital in the newly liberated zone, people scream in pain because they’re fighting to live.

•    No dissent or criticism of the regime allowed

•    No appreciation for beauty, no room for diversity

I’ve read a good number of books about the Marxist regimes that held power during the 20th Century, mostly those concerning Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, & Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. You would think that the knowledge we have now of the parallel circumstances that existed between these regimes would be sufficient to help us discern the roots that give rise to the fruits of this type of movement. As a system of government, communism seems to have had its day, but as a system of ideas, it lives on. ‘Political Correctness is Cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms’:




Some interesting links to check out:

This article on Genocide compares the Nazi system of classification and symbolization, the first two operations in the genocidal process, with the Khymer Rouge exterminations of people in the Eastern Zone:

At Phnom Pehn the Khmer Rouge issued every man, woman and child from the Eastern zone a new blue and white checked scarf, a kroma. The Khmer Rouge then required them to wear the scarf at all times. 

Power Kills -  'As a  government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens.'

Large corporations & institutions can tend toward totalitarian structures:





Linking to Carole's Books You loved: April

Mother Culture: Interior Riches

Interior Riches
I happened upon this fetching little phrase in the second chapter of Elizabeth Goudge’s book, The Rosemary Tree, and immediately thought how well it matched the idea of Mother Culture. (If you are unfamiliar with the idea of Mother Culture, the concept is explained in this article at AmblesideOnline's Parent's Review Archives.)

'...out of chance phrases and flashes of beauty (Michael) had always in old days been able to build for himself his country of escape. “Rest and ease, a convenient place, pleasant fields and groves, murmuring springs, and a sweet repose of mind.” Cervantes had known the same country, and had doubtless retained the power to create it even in the midst of misery, so great were his own interior riches.
But Michael’s imagination had always been dependent upon exterior bounty, and cut off from that he had been cut off from his country too.'

The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge

 

Goudge’s character, Michael Stone, has an aura of mystery about him as well as a great affection for Don Quixote.
It’s been said that the inspiration for Miguel Cervantes’ character, Don Quixote, came to him while he was in prison and Michael believed that thinking of the great Cervantes and his suffering helped to keep him sane at times.
Cervantes had a great store of interior riches that he drew upon during his miserable and inhumane imprisonment by Ottoman pirates, whereas Michael was reliant upon external sources, and once they were removed, his imagination was unable to give him a place of rest; to take him to his country of escape. He did not have to power to create a sweet repose of mind, a pleasant place, because he had never made the effort to store up interior riches.

Last year I lost myself in one of the most inspirational autobiographies I’ve ever read: Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, a woman, who in her early fifties, who was locked up in solitary confinement for six and a half years during the Cultural Revolution. During those years she drew upon her interior riches: Poetry and Psalms she had memorised; the intellectual culture of thinking and remembering she had practised throughout her life while she was still free; not to mention the physical disciplines she made herself undergo to keep her body from total deterioration while enduring the effects of starvation in prison.

Interior riches. We never know when we may be left without external resources to sustain our souls but what we have made a part of us can’t be taken away.

•    Scripture memory
•    Beautiful art work stored in the mind
•    Intellectual & aesthetic culture
•    The discipline of reading, thinking, & remembering
•    Inspiring music
•    History
•    Nature appreciation


Mother Culture: filling my soul with Interior Riches for the present, and to draw upon in the future.

A New Zealand Living Book for Children: The Hole in the Hill by Ruth Park (1917-2010)

Ruth Park was born and educated in New Zealand and moved to Australia in 1942 where she married D'Arcy Francis Niland, also an author, and best known for his novel, The Shiralee (1955).

The Hole in the Hill was Ruth Parks' first children's book and was published in 1961. It was published in the USA as Secret of the Maori Cave and is partly the story of the meeting of two cultures, and partly just a good old adventure.

Fourteen year old Brownie Mackenzie and her twelve year old brother, Dunk, travel with their father from New South Wales to New Zealand after their Great Uncle died. The eccentric old man left his run-down New Zealand farm, Three-Mile, to their father in his will with a letter stating that some day the place might be more valuable than gold.
Mr. Mackenzie had laughed at this as his uncle had a reputation of being quite strange but Dunk was excited at the prospect that they might come across some sort of treasure.

Arriving in Auckland, the two children quickly became bored and homesick as they waited while their father discussed the affair with a solicitor. Impatient with the two of them, Mr Mackenzie suggested they travel on ahead to the farm and do some exploring and camping for a couple of days and when he had finished his business he would join them.
So off they went the eighty miles on the train to Te Taniwha, the closest town to the farm where adventure, mystery and danger awaited them.

She looked disconsolately around the landscape. How different it was from New South Wales, where at this hour the galahs would be whirling down in clouds to drink at the lagoons, rose pink on one turn, Pearl grey on the next, making their funny squeaking noise like a cork rubbing on a bottle. The rally eucalypts would be standing frail and black against a ruby-bright Australian sunset, and the big bogong moths would be coming in to boom and bumble against the lamps.

Ruth Park has created a very real sense of time and place in this, her first book for children. The New Zealand setting with the description of caves is excellent:

They peered through stalactites at the cave beyond. The light of the torch was swallowed up by the enormous darkness, but it showed a chamber unimaginably huge sculptures from icy-white marble, with a roof scalloped and fringed and dew-dropped with glittering folds and loops and pinnacles. The floor was peaked and drawn up into mighty blunt pillars, here and there prickling and gleaming as though it were carpeted with polar-bear skin. Only the gentle, speaking roar of falling water filled the cave, steady and awesome. Brownie felt tears in her eyes at the strangeness of it, that this magical, other-world beauty should be hidden away like this, in a hole in the hill.

When we took some of our children through the glow-worm caves in New Zealand, we couldn't find anything at the time that explained these creatures in a non-technical, living way, so I was really pleased to find this little descriptive passage in The Hole in the Hill:

In spite of her natural-history lessons, Brownie did not know that the New Zealand glow-worm is creature unique in its class, a shabby little grub, the larva of a mosquito-like insect with a wing-span of less than an inch; she knew, however, that his primitive fairy speck if life, living its life darkness and silence, fished for food by means of a dangling necklace of minute diamonds, a sticky finger of cold fire which lured and trapped tiny flying midges.

Between frightening noises in the night, being chased by 'Captain Cookers' (feral pigs introduced when Captain Cook first visited New Zealand), dangerous underground caverns and a troubling mystery, the book moves along apace and keeps the reader interested.

I think the ideal age for children to read this book on their own is about 10 years of age but the interest level is fairly broad so it would make a good family read aloud for around ages 12 years and under. It is out of print but available secondhand, especially under its alternative USA title.
HB 144 pages.

Information on the author:

Ruth Park's Obituary

A letter the author wrote to children

Living books for the 20th Century: Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng (1986)

'On the evening of 30 August when the Red Guards came to loot my house...

I was sitting alone in my study reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich...'

What an incredible story this is! Nien Cheng's memoir, Life and Death in Shangai is saturated with spiritual and soul stretching lessons from her exceptional life. I've read a few books set during Mao's Cultural Revolution but this account stands out for the sheer courage, audacity, and fortitude displayed by the author.
In some respects, Nien Cheng reminds me of Kostoglotov in Solzhenitsyn's book Cancer Ward - two individuals pushing against a totalitarian system.

Nien Cheng was born in Peking in 1915 and studied Economics in London in the mid-1930's. She met her husband during this time and upon their return to China in 1939, he became a diplomatic officer in the Kuomintang Government.
When the Communist Party entered Shanghai in 1949 he was asked to remain in office for the transitional period, after which he was allowed to leave and take on the position of general manager of the Shell International Petroleum Company based in Shanghai.
In 1957 Nien Cheng's husband died of cancer and she was asked to fill the position of assistant to the new general manager, becoming the only woman in Shanghai to occupy a senior role in a company that was acclaimed worldwide, a role she enjoyed until 1966.
Up until the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party didn't decree how people should live, but from time to time political campaigns rocked the country, and when people fell victim to these their incomes were drastically reduced or they and their families were relocated. For seventeen years Nien Chen had made an effort to make her home a haven for her daughter, Meiping, and herself, and managed to maintain their standard of living, 'so that we could continue to enjoy good taste while the rest of the city was being taken over by proletarian realism.'
Meiping, a young actress in the Shanghai Film Studio, was an attractive and intelligent young woman who had learned from an early age that 'the classless society of Communism had a more rigid class system than the despised capitalist society.'
When the Communists gained control of China a new system of discrimination developed against the children of the educated and affluent, who found themselves handicapped because of their family background.

Nien Cheng was falsely accused of being a British spy in 1966 and imprisoned in solitary confinement for six and a half years. She steadfastly maintained her innocence throughout that time, defying her brutal interrogators with quotes from Mao's red book and her quick wits.
There was a mysterious element behind her arrest that she wasn't able to identify until much later, but it added a background of suspense to her story.
Although there were many sad and intense moments in Nien Cheng's account, at times she made me feel like laughing and giving a cheer...such as when she was being outrageously denounced by former employees of the company she worked for:

...I must put a stop to this farce. I jerked my head up and laughed uproariously.
My reaction was not what anyone had expected. There was a moment of stunned silence.

She disciplined herself to stay calm and maintain a cool politeness while her interrogators ranted and yelled at her. Her logical responses and her refusal to be bullied into a false confession were a source of frustration to those who were unaccustomed to this type of response. Throughout her imprisonment she had no contact with her daughter but her overwhelming concern was for her safety and she was careful not to do or say anything that would jeopordise her child's future.
When she was facing the extreme cold of her cell and the lack of food, she forced herself to keep her mind active by recalling poetry she had memorised and worked out ways to give her body some exercise without the guards noticing.

There were so many quotable passages in this book but here are a few that especially stood out  to me:

'I'm not a spy for anybody. I have nothing to confess,' I said firmly to the wall from where Mao's portrait looked down on me. As I gazed at Mao's face wearing what was intended as a benign expression but what was in fact a smirk of self-satisfaction, I wondered how one single person could have caused the extent of misery that was prevailing in China. There must be something lacking in our own character, I thought, that had made it possible for his evil genius to dominate.

When a man was denounced, he was depicted as totally bad, and any errant behaviour was attributed to the influence of capitalism. 

A Party officer entered her home and spat on the carpet - the first time that the author saw a declaration of power made in a gesture of rudeness:

...I had come to realize that the junior officers of the Party often used the exaggerated gesture of rudeness to cover up their feelings of inferiority.

The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the 'Four Olds' - old culture, old customs, old habits and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of 'old'; it was left to the Red Guards to decide...

Political correctness had them changing the names of streets...the Bund was renamed Revolutionary Boulevard.

The Red Guards debated whether to reverse the system of traffic lights, as they thought Red should mean Go and not Stop. In the meantime, traffic lights stopped operating.

They seemed to be blissfully happy in their work of destruction because they were sure they were doing something to satisfy their God, Mao Tze-tung. Their behaviour was the result of their upbringing from childhood in Communist China. The propaganda they had absorbed precluded their having a free will of their own.


Nien Cheng developed bronchitis and a 'doctor' was sent to her cell. After explaining to the young man that she had a fever and had been coughing for nearly two months he declared that she probably had hepatitis! She realized he was not a trained doctor at all, but had been given the job because although unskilled, he was politically reliable:

The young man was simply carrying out Mao's order to 'learn to be a doctor by being one.'

'...It's not the purpose if the proletarian class to destroy your body. We want to save your soul by reforming your way of thinking.' Although Mao Tze-tung and his followers were atheists, they were fond of talking about the 'soul.' In his writing, Mao often referred to the saving of a man's soul. During the Cultural Revolution, 'soul' was mentioned frequently...
While no one could ask Mao Tze-tung or Lin Piao what exactly they meant when they talked about a man's 'soul', it greatly taxed the ingenuity of the Marxist writers of newspaper articles who had to explain their leader's words to the people.

On the objective of the Proletarian Revolution to form a classless society, which at first seemed an attractive and idealistic picture when Nien Cheng was a student:

...after living in Communist China for the past seventeen years, I knew that such a society was only a dream because those who seized power would invariably become the new ruling class....
In Communist China, details of the private lives of the leaders were guarded as State secrets. But every Chinese knew that the Party leaders lived in spacious mansions with many servants, obtained their provisions from special shops where luxury goods were made available to their households at nominal prices and sent their children in chauffeur-driven cars to exclusive schools to be taught by specially selected teachers...

Nien Chen was finally told she could leave prison, that the proletarian had magnanimously decided to refrain against pressing charges against her, but she wanted a full apology and refused to leave without one. The interrogators had never had a prisoner refuse to leave detention and were nonplussed. Meanwhile two guards arrived and dragged her outside. She was to endure further years of harrasment before she was eventually able to leave China.

This is such an excellent book and there are so many parallels to our present age with the push to be politically correct and the Marxist influence in many university courses. It's scheduled as a possible biography in Ambleside Online Year 11. I've used Mao Tse-Tung & His China by Albert Marrin in the past, which is a good book also, but not a personal account like Nien Cheng's, and a couple of other books we already had, but I found a copy of Life & Death in Shanghai recently and it's a book that I'd highly recommend.


Some information about the author:

Nien Cheng (1915-2009) established a Chinese embassy in Australia with her husband before communism Photo: Getty

"There were many Chinese who fought back and many who suffered much more. Some of them have never recovered," she said. "But my privilege has been to write about it, and that's only been possible because I could leave."


"It was not until later that Cheng learned that her interrogators were trying to get her to confess to being a spy so that Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s wife) and other radicals could oust Premier Zhou Enlai, a moderate who favored allowing foreign firms like Shell to operate in China."

Ten Fingers for God by Dorothy Clarke Wilson (1965)

Ten Fingers for God explores the life and work of Dr. Paul Brand, who was born in India to missionary parents, lived there until he was sent to school in England, and later returned to work and teach at a medical college in the southern Indian city of Vellore. 
Surgeon, teacher, and environmentalist, Dr. Brand achieved fame mostly for his pioneering research on the disease of leprosy. As a child growing up in the mountains of Madras, (re-named Chennai) he witnessed an incident which remained in his memory, a potent reminder of the awful plight and stigma for victims of leprosy. 
When Paul was nine years of age, his family had a furlough in England. A few months later, his parents returned to India while he and his younger sister, Connie, remained with relatives in order to go to school. They never saw their father again as he died of Blackwater Fever a few years later.

Paul disliked study and the school routine. He was used to the freedom of life in India where he'd sit up in a tree to do his lessons and pass his work down to his mother sitting on the ground underneath. He refused to conform, and his reports consisted of remarks such as "Poor, fair, rather disappointing; Next term we shall hope for better things."  

It wasn't books that Paul disliked, merely school books. He read avidly, often on the way to school, with such eagerness that he often ran into people. His taste in literature was respectable if not highbrow, tending largely toward adventure takes such as The Coral Islands and Westward Ho! He liked Dickens but abhorred Scott. In fact, English, next to the sciences, was his favourite subject. 

Paul tended to shine more in less admirable activities...climbing, avoiding school sports and performing dangerous science experiments in the playroom of his aunts' immaculate and genteel residence!

Paul's mother hoped he would train to be a doctor. His father had wanted to do this himself, at one time starting a course at Madras University, but Paul had no intention of becoming a doctor. The memory of his father's medical work repulsed him - pus, ulcers, blood. He decided to leave school and train to be a builder. 
After five years of training he applied to the mission board but was rejected as 'not being ready.' The two options open for him were Bible School and a short course in tropical medicine. He didn't want to do either... but he remembered his father. 

Jesse Brand had left the building trade for what he considered a nobler calling. He had prepared for his work by taking a short course in tropical medicine. His son would do the same. 

Paul found that he loved the work and the study, and his whole attitude to medical work changed. In 1937, on the eve of World War II, he was accepted into the University College Medical School in London. Here he was to meet his future wife, Margaret, their courtship taking place in the midst of evacuations and bombings, and their marriage in 1943. The war gave the young surgeon experience that would normally have taken years to acquire, and when the V-I bombs came flying over London, he was operating almost constantly, repairing gun wounds, cuts and other acute injuries. It was during this time that he became profoundly interested in the repair of severed nerves and tendons, especially in hands and feet. The skill and expertise he acquired was to serve him well in his work with leprosy patients later on. 

I really enjoy medical missionary biographies and this book is a re-read. Most of my children have read it also, usually around the age of 12 years or a little older, and I've assigned it to Moozle this term. 
Dorothy Clarke Wilson has written an engaging, joy-filled story, capturing Paul's earthy upbringing, his father's enthusiasm for nature - which he passed onto his son - his mother's dynamic personality and passion, Paul's love for the people he worked with and those he served; his struggles to overcome the stigma associated with leprosy, and his disappointments. The book also describes the disease of Leprosy (also known as Hansen's Disease), its mode of transmission, treatment, and its history. I would have loved to have read this when I was twelve!

Some highlights: 

" ...the most precious possession any human being has is his spirit, his will to live, his sense of dignity, his personality. Once that has been lost the opportunity for rehabilitation is lost. Though our profession may be a technical one, concerned with tendons, bones, and nerve endings, we must realize that it is the person behind it that is so important. Of course we need technicians: surgeons, physiotherapists, nurses, occupational therapists, vocational guidance specialists. But above all we need men and women who are concerned with people and who accept the challenge of the whole person, his life, his faith, and his hope." 

John, an older, almost blind patient, came to Paul and begged to have his claw hand opened. Paul said that there were so many able-bodied young men coming for surgery... "Your hands would take a lot of time, because they're stiff. And suppose, we did open them out, how could you use them? If you can't see or feel..."
 
But the old man persisted...
 
"I believe I could bring music to people...I use to be able to play the organ, and I'm sure that if you open my fingers, I could play again."
"Without being able to feel or see?" Paul had to be brutally honest. "I'm sorry, John, but how could you possibly play?"
The clawed hands crooked in a beseeching gesture. "I know how you feel, doctor, but - please just give me a chance."

Paul was unable to resist, and he operated with great misgivings on John's hands, the results being moderately successful.
John asked to be led to an organ and he sat at the keyboard while his nerveless hands fumbled and produced some discordant sounds. Paul was glad John couldn't see the pity on his face...

Then suddenly the organ swelled, not merely into melody but into the full harmony of the glorious hymn, "Jesus shall reign where'er the sun." And as the music came flooding out of the crude little box there spread over the uplifted face an ineffable smile of oracle and satisfaction. Paul almost wept.

We're using this book in the first term of AmblesideOnline Year 7 as a devotional read and as a book set in Asia.


Linking to 2017 Cloud of Witnesses Reading Challenge





 

The Small Woman by Alan Burgess (1957)

The Small Woman by Alan Burgess is an inspiring and very well-written biography of Gladys Aylward, missionary to China for twenty years. In her mid-twenties she went through a probationary period at the China Inland Mission in London but was rejected on account of her lack of qualifications and the belief that at her age the Chinese language would be extremely difficult to learn. Still, Gladys felt called by God to go China and although bitterly disappointed at first, she wasn't going to let this stop her.
She was a parlourmaid and didn't earn much money so she decided upon the cheapest possible mode of transport and took herself to a travel agent to make her first payment towards a ticket. He tried to tell her that although her chosen route via the Trans-Siberian railway was the cheapest option, it wasn't possible due to a conflict between Russia and China.

"I couldn't really care about a silly old war," she had said. "It's the cheapest way, isn't it? That's what I want. Now, if you'll book me a passage, you can have this three pounds on account, and I'll pay you as much as I can every week."
"We do not," the clerk had replied, choosing his words with the pedantic care of the extremely irritated, "like to deliver our customers-dead!"
She had stared up at him. His acidulousness had no effect whatsoever. She was quite logically feminine about it all. "Oh, they won't hurt me," she said. "I'm a woman. They won't bother about me."

She set out in 1930 after paying for her ticket in full. She was thirty years old, alone, and with only one contact in China - seventy-three year old Jeannie Lawson, a widow who had stayed on in China after her husband died. Gladys had written to her and Mrs Lawson said that if she could make her way to China, Gladys could stay with her. With no financial resources or official backing, and no knowledge of the Chinese language, she left England, boarded a train at The Hague, and crossed into Siberia ten days later.
Her intention was to take the train all the way across Siberia and then board a steamer for Tientsin in China, but a brief undeclared war between China and Russia over possession of the China Eastern Railway brought her rail trip to an end near the Manchurian border.
Unable to proceed any further, her only option was to walk back along the railway track to the last town, which she did in the bitter cold and dark, camping in the open overnight, wrapped in the fur rug made by her mother out of an old coat, and using her suitcases as a windbreak while she slept. She eventually reached the town of Chita and after some misunderstandings and frightening experiences with officials, who thought that the word 'missionary' on her passport implied she worked with 'machinery' and so would be a good asset in Russia, she went on her way to Vladivostok. Here a young woman, who was a complete stranger to her, warned her to leave Russia straight away or she would never get out. The woman told her to seek passage on a Japanese ship docked at the harbour and after explaining her situation to the captain, Gladys was given free passage to Japan.
Her experiences in Russia shocked her and left her with a sense that the people were downtrodden and wretched.

'For her the cold wind which sifted through the streets carrying on its breath the desolation of Siberia epitomised Russia. She felt in her bones the bewilderment and hopelessness of so many of its people. She could not canalise her feelings into a coherent, critical appraisal; she only knew how desperately she wanted to leave this country.'

Gladys did finally arrive in China after a brief stay in Japan, and found her way to Yancheng where Mrs Lawson lived and together they opened an Inn (The Inn of Eight Happinesses) where traders stayed overnight, heard the gospel and then went on their way over the mountains to tell others.
Eight months later Mrs Lawson died and Gladys was placed a precarious position financially. She was saved from possible disaster when the local Mandarin paid her a visit and asked her to be his official 'foot inspector.' Gladys was basically given carte blanche in this position; two soldiers accompanied her on her expeditions into the countryside to ensure that the Mandarin's orders outlawing foot binding were carried out, and she used these times to spread the Gospel, becoming known and beloved by all as she did so.

These were times of great satisfaction for Gladys. She loved China and its people, learnt to speak multiple dialects fluently and fully identified with her adopted country when she became a Chinese citizen in 1936.

'...Gladys had not merely learnt the language; she had embedded herself in it like a stone in a fruit. The language had grown around her.'

In 1938 war came to China when the Japanese invaded:

'The policy of the Japanese was plain. For years they had operated their 'master' race policies in their northern colony of Korea. The Japanese were aristocrats, the Koreans serfs! No Korean was educated above an elementary  level; no Korean ever held an administrative post of any importance; they were reduced to a proletarian and peasant level and kept there. Hitler was putting the same theories into operation on the other side of the world. The same treatment was already accorded those areas of North China in the enemy's grasp.'

Some of the many highlights of the book are Gladys going into a prison, quaking in her boots, to quell a riot led by a huge man running around with a machete; leading a hundred homeless children on a twelve day march over the mountains to the Yellow River, the colourful descriptions of the China and the Chinese culture, and her relationship with the local Mandarin, who she eventually led  to Christ.
She became known by the name Ai-weh-deh, the virtuous one, and remained in China until 1947, a witness of the end of a Chinese era that lasted for forty centuries.

Japan withdrew from China in 1945 but civil war continued to rage between the Nationalists and the Reds. These were heartbreaking years for Gladys; the Communists saw Christians as enemies and maltreated and persecuted them:

'She saw the faith of her friends and converts outlawed and attacked by every moral and physical means imaginable, by a godless philosophy with its lunatic assertion that "the ends justifies the means."'

The Small Woman is a remarkable, inspiring story. I read this book years ago and so did my older children, but I'd forgotten about it until Brandy @Afterthoughts mentioned that she was thinking of using it as a devotional book for one of her children. I decided to read it again to see if it was as good as I remembered. I wasn't disappointed.

There is so much to be gained from this story, and I especially recommend it for girls around the ages of  twelve or thirteen years and up. Our young women are surrounded by a culture that encourages them to push for their rights, to smash through the 'glass ceiling,' to be the best they can be, to prove they are just as good as men and are quite capable of doing anything they can do. I don't have an issue with equality, or capability, but I've been reading in Matthew 10, which obviously applies to both male and female:

"The one who finds his life will lose it, and the one who loses his life because of me will find it."

Gladys Aylward knew she had work to do and that God had called her. She went against everything her culture expected of her, not to gain recognition or to be be able to say, 'I was the first women ever to do this.' When the door to missionary work closed in her face she didn't complain that she was discriminated against but believed that God would make a way when there was no way - because she was willing to lose her life. In fact, in the midst of the upheaval of war and persecution in China, she wrote this to her family:

'Do not wish me out of this or in any way seek to get me out, for I will not be got out while this trial is on. These are my people; God has given them to me, and I will live or die with them for Him 

and His Glory.'

A word on age suitability

A few situations to be aware of, although I must say that some of them were quite powerful demonstrations of God's intervention:

Gladys spent some time serving as a 'Rescue Sister' on the docks. '...she hardly knew how they 'fell' or what she was supposed to be rescuing them from...and the drunken sailors under the blotchy yellow street lamps...were just as likely to mistake her for a prostitute and act accordingly.'

Japanese soldiers broke into the mission's women's court intent on rape, 'with struggling screaming women in various stages of undress.' The soldiers didn't succeed - I love what happened here!

A Chinese Christian was forced to watch when the Japanese set fire to his house while his wife and children were inside.

There are some good biographies on Gladys Aylward's life for younger children (that I'll write about later) but I highly recommend this one at some stage.
Out of print but available secondhand.



Linking up with Cloud of Witnesses Reading Challenge and Back to the Classics 2017  - Classic Set in a Place You'd Like to Visit.

Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution by Ji-Li Jiang (1997)

Red Scarf Girl is a young girl's account of her life between the age of 12 to 14 years during the Cultural Revolution which began in 1966 when she was in the sixth grade. Up until then, Ji Li Jiang had lived a comfortable and happy family life in Shanghai. She excelled in her school studies and athletics, and was looking forward to a bright future.
Almost overnight, her way of life fell apart, and she was faced with choices that were totally confusing to a young girl. Ji-Li later became one of those now known as the 'lost generation,' an entire group of young people who were separated from their families and forced to forfeit their education when they were sent into the countryside to perform manual labour.

'After ten years of sacrifice in the primitive countryside most of these young people returned to the city with little education, few skills, and no beliefs. All regretted the waste of their youth, and all have struggled to start over again.'

Mao Ze-dong had led the Communist Party since 1949, but when his economic measures proved to be calamitous for the country and his rivals began to be more powerful, he implemented the Cultural Revolution or 'The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution' to re-establish his authority.
For ten years this policy produced absolute chaos and social upheaval as masses of young people were mobilised into Red Guards who waged war against the "four olds” - old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas.
This is the true story of the impossible dilemmas Ji Li and her family faced as a result of Mao's policy, told simply with a child-like innocence and transparency.
For Ji-Li and others like her, Chairman Mao was God. It wasn't until Mao died that they realised they had been brainwashed and that the Cultural Revolution was basically a power struggle and they had been manipulated.
I've read numerous books on this time period but this is the first one I've read through a young girl's eyes. It doesn't go into great detail about the atrocities committed during this time period, but it does give a very personal account of what the author and her family and friends went through, including her father's imprisonment, beatings, humiliations, and the suicide of an elderly neighbour who threw herself out of a window.
At one point she describes how she thought that she didn't want to live but she had promised her mother that she would take care of her younger siblings if anything happened. She came to a point where her goals didn't matter to her and seemed unimportant:

'Now my life was defined by my responsibilities. I had promised to take care if my family, and I would renew that promise every day. I would not give up or withdraw, no matter how hard life became. I would hide my tears and my fear for Mom and Grandma's sake. It was my turn to take care of them.'

It's a little difficult but to know what age range it would be best for, partly because of the way it's written, (i.e. in a young girl's voice) but I think about age 13 or 14 years and up. The effect of the advent of the Red Guards on the school students would make for a valuable discussion, with bullies, troublemakers and lazy students gaining the advantage over the conscientious and those who were considered to be from a 'bad class' - Ji-Li's grandfather was a landlord, so that put her family in that category. Power was placed into the hands of those most unfitted for it.
It is frightening to read about how easily someone could have been accused of being an enemy of the people just because of jealousy, how a stray word could lead inadvertently to betrayal, and how the youth were manipulated and so quickly rejected their respect for older people that was inherent in the Chinese culture.
A simple but powerful story. 285 pages.