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Spanning thirty-five years, this memoir chronicles the life of a woman buffeted by the winds of history. The fourth child of a factory owner whose business is taken from him, she poignantly relates the terrors of The Cultural Revolution that tore her family apart, while at the same time almost miraculously retaining her sense of humor and perspective.
With an ironic eye, she offers a riveting account of her work on a prison farm, where, as the child of a capitalist," she was continually subjected to humiliating psychological torture. She wryly recounts her changes in fortune: first an acceptance into Beijing University; then in a consummate irony, a job offer with the Chinese Secret Police. Managing to get herself reassigned to the Foreign Ministry as a translator, the girl from the prison farm finds herself translating for the delegations of such dignitaries as Queen Elizabeth, Ronald Reagan, and Imelda Marcos.
In the moving and dramatic final section, Ye writes about her unhappy feudal-style marriage, her love affair with a Westerner, and her subsequent defection, an act full of intrigues and consequences.
