A young woman grows up under Maoist oppression in China and survives through the power of reading in this "simply and hauntingly told" YA memoir (The New York Times).
In 1966, Moying Li was a young student in Beijing, destined for a promising future. But everything changed when student Red Guards began a series of brutal assaults, public humiliations, and forced confessions. After witnessing her teachers beaten in public, Moying fled for the safety of home, only to see her grandmother denounced, her home ransacked, her father's precious books confiscated, and Baba himself taken away.
From a labor camp, Baba entrusted a friend to deliver a reading list of banned books to Moying so that she could continue to learn. With so much of her life at risk, she still found sanctuary in the world of imagination and language.
This inspiring memoir follows Moying Li from age twelve to twenty-two, illuminating a complex, dark time in China's history as it tells the compelling story of one girl's difficult but determined coming-of-age during the Cultural Revolution.