Bitter Winds : A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag

Rating:
Summary: Now I Know
Review: I've been very aware of the Holocaust and all its horrors and injustices. I have seen movies, read articles, read books; all the information is there. But the Cultural Revolution? I only knew that it happened in China - I wasn't even sure what years it occured. I had no concept of its irrational and unjust practices. No idea of the horrible lengths of time people were incarcerated, no idea of the revolting conditions and unspeakable starvation. Harry Wu is right. He did need to write this and inform us. I kept thinking back to my own life during the years he was describing. 1960-61-62? graduating from college, getting married and having my first child. Did I have my head in the sand or did we not have the coverage of events that we have today? I didn't know (or maybe wasn't interested) in events on the other side of the world - except to urge my children to clean their plates because children in China were starving. I had no idea! Harry Wu writes candidly, clearly and courageously. This is a book that I will not forget and will urge friends to read. I travel to China in June for 3 weeks. All the people I will see who are my age (62) experienced some form of repression, indignity, involvement - the list goes on. How I admire them and honor them for their perserverance. Thank you, Harry Wu!

Rating:
Summary: Bitter Winds, Indeed....
Review: Returning in 1994 from China as a Fulbright Scholar, I could not shake China off. It has become part of my consciousness forever. After writing an essay on classical and modern Chinese literature, with Confucius, Tu Fu, Lu Xun, Lu Wenfu, and other classical and modern writers fresh in my mind, I reread the writings of Fang Lizhi and continued to struggle to understand my experience in China. Appalled by the injustices of a political system that could imprison and destroy so many members of its own culture, from all walks of life, I then read in November of 1994 Harry Wu's Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag.

Arrested in 1960 for reasons no real judicial system in the world would recognize, Harry Wu spent the next nineteen years of his life in one brutally subhuman labor camp after another until he was released in 1979 and eventually given permission to leave China for the United States. The victim of slave labor, starvation, and torture, Wu, at times broken physically and near death, endured with the hope of some day telling the world of his experience:

"My travels in 1991, when I returned to China to film [secretly] the conditions within the labor camps, fulfilled part of a consuming mission. Even though I had found safety in the United States, I had never found rest. Always I recalled the faces I had left behind. Always I worried that while I had escaped, the labor-reform system continued to operate, day by day, year by year, largely unnoticed, unchallenged, and therefore unchanged. I felt urgently the responsibility not just to disclose but to publicize the truth about the Communist Party's mechanisms of control, whatever the risk to me, whatever the discomfort of telling my story. Each time I revisited my past, I hoped it would be the last time, but I had decided that my experiences belonged not only to me and not only to China's history. They belonged to humanity." (285-286)

Like so many accounts of the Soviet gulag, Harry Wu's is a voice of witness, of moral memory, compelled from within to speak the truth in the hope of finding justice before the universal court of humankind. Without relating the many tragic incidents of Wu's book, let me just say his words sank into me and left me deeply shaken, struggling further to understand the country I had just visited, struggling further to understand what the African-American writer Ralph Ellison was fond of calling "human complexity." Fang Lizhi's own words on Harry Wu's 1994 book are worth quoting: "The injustices he chronicles are still going on today. His special point of view on history and politics makes it possible to understand why a democratic China is a dream that shall never die." I was once more deeply distressed when Harry Wu was arrested in June of 1995, while entering China as an American citizen and on an American passport. His ordeal confirmed for me the side of Chinese political reality that I had painfully sensed and observed while there, and which all so unfortunately still continues as attested by the suppression of the Falun Gong and others.

It was while visiting Shenzhen, the city of the new economic policy, that I noticed the assistant to the mayor pick up from the meeting room table a copy of a speech he proceeded to read to our Fulbright group. Well worn, soiled, with the pages curling from repeated reading to one collection of foreigners after another, the paper described in glowing terms the achievements of Shenzhen's economic miracle. After handling us in apparently the usual way, when someone perceptively asked what the residency status of the three million workers in Shenzhen was, the mayor's assistant tried to put a good face on the fact that two million were on temporary internal work papers, primarily male, since a proportionate number of women and children are excluded from the

"city," and subject to dismissal at any time back to the countryside. Looking out the bus window as we drove to the train station to Hong Kong, I could not but think of the Soviet Union's Potemkin villages.

Harry Wu's 1995 experience further confirms that such injustices as he chronicles are continuing today. In 1994 one of the unexpected sights I saw with my own eyes, by chance, in crowded Beijing traffic, was a man handcuffed and blindfolded, sitting in the back of a jeep with two policemen, on his way somewhere he could not see. A few days later a Chinese friend who grew up in Beijing told me that only political prisoners are ever blindfolded. Far from China needing business now and human rights later, China needs, as all countries need, human rights and democracy first and foremost and forever.

I remember reading that Eleanor Roosevelt, as chairwoman, served in 1947 on the Human Rights Commission with China's representative, Dr. Peng-Chun Chang, as vice-chairman. Together, along with members of eighteen other nations, they helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to her own testimony, Dr. Chang repeatedly challenged the Western representatives, reminded them of the importance of the ideas of Confucius on human rights, and argued philosophically for their incorporation along side those of Thomas Aquinas and other Western thinkers. It is historically accurate to say the resulting document is truly representative of the best of China's own philosophical thinking on human rights, basic human values.

I do not know whether Fang Lizhi or Harry Wu is aware of the contribution of China to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I do know I believe the following words by Fang Lizhi articulate the most profound vision of human life and experience now available to the consciousness of late twentieth-century human beings, East or West, a vision toward which we all must

continue struggling to evolve:

"The values that underlie human dignity are common to all peoples. They are the universal standards of human rights that apply without regard to race, nationality, language, or creed. Symbolized by the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these principles are increasingly accepted and respected throughout the world." ("Keeping the Faith" 262)

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the most engrossing book I've ever read.
Review: Syndicated pundit Don Feder once referred to modern day China as "the reincarnation of the Third Reich with lo mien noodles." Harry Wu's autobiographical tome of the hellish conditions inside Chinese labor camps lends substantial credence to that caustic description. As tragic as the nightmare he endured is, the situation in modern China has in many ways has deteriorated even further. Harry Wu is one of many children; such a family would never be allowed under the current one-child policy. Actually, it is easy to see why a depraved and violent population controlling policy has been instituted. As the Wus demonstrate, the family is the hardest institution to destroy, and with large and strong families the norm, China's insensate government would be hampered in its drive for domination over all aspects of life.

More than a few of the horrors he documents have a frightening familiarity. Anyone familiar with the opinion-controlling practices currently at place Ivy League colleges will see an eerie counterpart to China's universities in the late 1950. Harry Wu writes of "the official encouragement of divergent opinions" as the nation transformed over to socialism. Like the modern diversity fad, the semantics did not match the policy. "Divergent opinions" yielded blind devotion to the Communist state, just as diversity training demands the surrender of individuality in favor of group labels and a collective mentality. Hostility to religion has become chic among the U.S. hoi polloi which also corresponds to China's ferociously enforced atheism. As a boy Harry Wu attended a Catholic School, but with little warning the nuns and priests were forcefully expelled from China. In another scary correlations, certain segments of American illuminati similarly disdain large families as impractical or burdensome upon women.

America's most admirable heroes are now under heavy fire from much of the elite establishment. Who hasn't heard George Washington denigrated as a slave owner or Abraham Lincoln as a racist who reluctantly freed the slaves? China also mastered the art of rewriting history. Wu discusses how Confucius was condemned as a reprobate because his teachings brilliantly controverted Communists doctrine.

The labor camp conditions he graphically describes are inhuman and heartbreaking. The fact that he even survived such brutality is astounding; his willingness to return to China and document the still thriving barbarism is nothing short of miraculous. Wu deserves much credit for that act of doughty selflessness.

As the Unites States Congress prepares to debate extending China's undeserved Trade Status, "Bitter Winds" should be read by every concerned American, and those issues should be raised with his or her congressman.

Rating:
Summary: A Glimpse into Hell
Review: Syndicated pundit Don Feder once referred to modern day China as "the reincarnation of the Third Reich with lo mien noodles." Harry Wu's autobiographical tome of the hellish conditions inside Chinese labor camps lends substantial credence to that caustic description. As tragic as the nightmare he endured is, the situation in modern China has in many ways has deteriorated even further. Harry Wu is one of many children; such a family would never be allowed under the current one-child policy. Actually, it is easy to see why a depraved and violent population controlling policy has been instituted. As the Wus demonstrate, the family is the hardest institution to destroy, and with large and strong families the norm, China's insensate government would be hampered in its drive for domination over all aspects of life.

More than a few of the horrors he documents have a frightening familiarity. Anyone familiar with the opinion-controlling practices currently at place Ivy League colleges will see an eerie counterpart to China's universities in the late 1950. Harry Wu writes of "the official encouragement of divergent opinions" as the nation transformed over to socialism. Like the modern diversity fad, the semantics did not match the policy. "Divergent opinions" yielded blind devotion to the Communist state, just as diversity training demands the surrender of individuality in favor of group labels and a collective mentality. Hostility to religion has become chic among the U.S. hoi polloi which also corresponds to China's ferociously enforced atheism. As a boy Harry Wu attended a Catholic School, but with little warning the nuns and priests were forcefully expelled from China. In another scary correlations, certain segments of American illuminati similarly disdain large families as impractical or burdensome upon women.

America's most admirable heroes are now under heavy fire from much of the elite establishment. Who hasn't heard George Washington denigrated as a slave owner or Abraham Lincoln as a racist who reluctantly freed the slaves? China also mastered the art of rewriting history. Wu discusses how Confucius was condemned as a reprobate because his teachings brilliantly controverted Communists doctrine.

The labor camp conditions he graphically describes are inhuman and heartbreaking. The fact that he even survived such brutality is astounding; his willingness to return to China and document the still thriving barbarism is nothing short of miraculous. Wu deserves much credit for that act of doughty selflessness.

As the Unites States Congress prepares to debate extending China's undeserved Trade Status, "Bitter Winds" should be read by every concerned American, and those issues should be raised with his or her congressman.

Rating:
Summary: One Man¡¯s Response to the Problem if Injustice.
Review: To start with, Harry Wu is a very good storyteller. This is a good story before it is anything else. I make a point of saying that, because there are several other things I liked about the book which probably would not have been as effective if the book had not been, before anything else, a good story.

Similar to "Son of the Revolution," this book begins with the anti-rightist movement. Harry Wu was imprisoned in 1960, and not released until 1979, so he almost completely missed the Cultural Revolution. There is mention of that period in this book, of course, but not the level of discussion that you find in other books which focus more specifically on the ten year period (1966-1976) that caused so much pain for the people of China. The connection between the anti-rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution is a sensitive issue, but it does need to be explored, because it opens our minds to the possibility that the ¡°trouble¡± began before 1966. In other words, there were significant factors prior to the Cultural Revolution which set the stage for it.

That out of the way, we can focus on what this book is about¡ªthe prison life of someone who never should have been in prison. That is the center around which every other part of the story revolves. So how good a job does this book do of sticking to that subject? For the most part, I give it high marks. I think this book does a very good job of pointing out the flaw in a system which incriminated citizens who were in no way a threat to society. Unfortunately, the book goes off on a tangent toward the end, and there seems to be more discussion about the prison system in China as a general topic for discussion. The author and his wife traveled back to China with a hidden camera and took pictures of prison camps. I felt that this bit of bravado to be irrelevant and distracting. Perhaps it was an impressive gimmick, but the pictures taken by the camera were unimpressive, at least the ones that were shown in the book. They proved that China has prisons and prisoners. So what? I¡¯m sorry, but with a nation of 1.3 billion people, you are going to have a few prisoners, and you have to have a place to put them. What would we prefer? That they be allowed to walk the streets and create havoc? But my primary irritation with this part of the book is that I feel it took away from what was (or at least should have been) the main point of the book. That is the folly of incriminating a person who is not, and should not be treated like a criminal. There was little that I saw in the treatment Harry Wu received that would have been fundamentally inappropriate if he had indeed been a criminal. There are a couple exceptions. Starving prisoners is never appropriate. But this was different, because the whole country was without food. There is no indication that the Chinese government deliberately denied food to prisoners that was available to other citizens. The other issue is solitary confinement. Putting anyone in a small concrete box is appalling. In a humane society, we give prisoners all the humanity and dignity which they have denied their victims. The only thing that is taken from them is their freedom, because they have shown that they cannot handle it responsibly. I am not opposed to capital punishment if it is humane, and if there is no question as to the guilt of the person who is being executed. What I am saying is that the treatment Harry received was, for the most part, not inhumane for someone who was truly a criminal. But Harry was not a criminal. That is the point. That is the only point.

When I was in college, I worked for a year in the prison system in the State of Oregon. I was impressed throughout this book by how not like those people Harry Wu was. He portrays himself (and I think rightly so) as a person who really was not a criminal and shouldn¡¯t have been treated that way. But he tends to discredit himself by the ¡°hidden camera¡± routine at the end of the book¡ªdisrespecting the laws of his former country and almost lending credibility to his original classification as antisocial.

This is an excellent book. Remember, of course, that it is history. This is not a description of China today. But it is still very useful, because it shows a bit of the connection between the Cultural Revolution and the anti-rightist movement, and because it helps one to understand a few of the factors which led to the tremendous changes which have taken place in China over the past 25 years.

Rating:
Summary: One Man¡¯s Response to the Problem if Injustice.
Review: To start with, Harry Wu is a very good storyteller. This is a good story before it is anything else. I make a point of saying that, because there are several other things I liked about the book which probably would not have been as effective if the book had not been, before anything else, a good story.

Similar to "Son of the Revolution," this book begins with the anti-rightist movement. Harry Wu was imprisoned in 1960, and not released until 1979, so he almost completely missed the Cultural Revolution. There is mention of that period in this book, of course, but not the level of discussion that you find in other books which focus more specifically on the ten year period (1966-1976) that caused so much pain for the people of China. The connection between the anti-rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution is a sensitive issue, but it does need to be explored, because it opens our minds to the possibility that the ¡°trouble¡± began before 1966. In other words, there were significant factors prior to the Cultural Revolution which set the stage for it.

That out of the way, we can focus on what this book is about¡ªthe prison life of someone who never should have been in prison. That is the center around which every other part of the story revolves. So how good a job does this book do of sticking to that subject? For the most part, I give it high marks. I think this book does a very good job of pointing out the flaw in a system which incriminated citizens who were in no way a threat to society. Unfortunately, the book goes off on a tangent toward the end, and there seems to be more discussion about the prison system in China as a general topic for discussion. The author and his wife traveled back to China with a hidden camera and took pictures of prison camps. I felt that this bit of bravado to be irrelevant and distracting. Perhaps it was an impressive gimmick, but the pictures taken by the camera were unimpressive, at least the ones that were shown in the book. They proved that China has prisons and prisoners. So what? I¡¯m sorry, but with a nation of 1.3 billion people, you are going to have a few prisoners, and you have to have a place to put them. What would we prefer? That they be allowed to walk the streets and create havoc? But my primary irritation with this part of the book is that I feel it took away from what was (or at least should have been) the main point of the book. That is the folly of incriminating a person who is not, and should not be treated like a criminal. There was little that I saw in the treatment Harry Wu received that would have been fundamentally inappropriate if he had indeed been a criminal. There are a couple exceptions. Starving prisoners is never appropriate. But this was different, because the whole country was without food. There is no indication that the Chinese government deliberately denied food to prisoners that was available to other citizens. The other issue is solitary confinement. Putting anyone in a small concrete box is appalling. In a humane society, we give prisoners all the humanity and dignity which they have denied their victims. The only thing that is taken from them is their freedom, because they have shown that they cannot handle it responsibly. I am not opposed to capital punishment if it is humane, and if there is no question as to the guilt of the person who is being executed. What I am saying is that the treatment Harry received was, for the most part, not inhumane for someone who was truly a criminal. But Harry was not a criminal. That is the point. That is the only point.

When I was in college, I worked for a year in the prison system in the State of Oregon. I was impressed throughout this book by how not like those people Harry Wu was. He portrays himself (and I think rightly so) as a person who really was not a criminal and shouldn¡¯t have been treated that way. But he tends to discredit himself by the ¡°hidden camera¡± routine at the end of the book¡ªdisrespecting the laws of his former country and almost lending credibility to his original classification as antisocial.

This is an excellent book. Remember, of course, that it is history. This is not a description of China today. But it is still very useful, because it shows a bit of the connection between the Cultural Revolution and the anti-rightist movement, and because it helps one to understand a few of the factors which led to the tremendous changes which have taken place in China over the past 25 years.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the most engrossing book I've ever read.
Review: Unbelievable memoir, one that stays with you and perhaps changes your perspective on life. Harry Wu brings a voice to those many Chinese who, arrested often without cause, spent and lost their lives in the grossly inhumane conditions of Chinese prison labor camps. The unjustness is beyond vast and continues today. This book should be required reading in college sociology, political science and history classes as it is unequivocally insightful and informative as well as meaningful. I hope that Harry Wu can continue to carry his important message in this newly adopted country that adores him and cherishes his very important work. We are listening, Harry.