Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong

Literature and Language
Memoir Project
Student’s Name
Course
Date
MEMOIR PROJECT
Wong, Jan. Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now.
Jan Wong went to China as an idealistic Maoist in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. She was a true believer and one of the two westerners who were allowed to enroll in Beijing. She studied welding of a pneumatic drill in the machine tool factory. Towards the end of Cultural Revolution, Jan Wong flew to China. During the revolution, Jan Wong renounced rock and roll, hauled pig manure in the paddy field. She also turns in a fellow student who had sought her assistance in getting to the United States. While in Beijing the Author denounced believing students who sought help to escape communist China to the West. Jan Wong also married the only American draft dodger by the name Norman Shulman from Vietnam she that she could be able to seek asylum China. Shulman was a popular text polisher and editor of Chinese Propaganda Magazine. The couple had two sons. Red China blue is an ironic and wrong staling memoir of Jan Wong romance that lasted for six years with Maoism. During the six years, the author was crumbled as she became aware of the harsh realities of communism that existed in China. She later returns to China as a journalist and covered both the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown and the chaotic era of capitalistic reforms under Deng Xiaoping.[Wong, Jan. 2011. Red China blues: my long march for Mao to now.] [Wong, Jan, and Jan Wong. 2010. A comrade lost and found: a Beijing story.]
The author covered some events as a correspondent during Chinas era of capitalists reform under Deng Xiaoping with her dramatic immediate account of the devastating Tiananmen square uprising and through her engagement of portrait individuals. The Author narrates some of the horrors that led her to disillusionment with the Workers paradise as she names it. The setting of the memoirs shows how the western world and what life is like in China. Jan Wan reacquaints with her old friends and more so her enemies of the radical past, she comes into terms with the legacy of the ancestral land. The author also recalls the memories of Gang four and Madame Mao when they were imprisoned after Mao Zedoing died. However, her idealism was not successful because it did not survive the harsh realities and the hypocrisy she experienced in China in 1970. She later abandoned her support for Maoism and eventually worked as a foreign correspondent in Canada.[Wong, Jan. 2011. Red China blues: my long march for Mao to now.] [Wong, Jan. 2011. Red China blues: my long march for Mao to now.] [Wong, Jan. 2017. Apron strings: navigating food and family in France, Italy, and China.]
Maoism is an aspect of communism revolution that impacted and reshapes the life of the author and her family. It was a Marxism Leninist aspect of communism that was associated with Mao Zedong. This aspect heightened some of the ideological differences that existed between the people of the Republic of China and the Soviet Union and it became increasingly evident in 1960. The Sino-Soviet separation in the international communist movement resulted to open hostility in China. China portrayed itself as the leader of the underdev...