Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

This gripping and poignant memoir (New York Times Book Review) draws us into the intersections of everyday life and Communist power from the first days of Liberation in 1949 through the post-Mao era. The son of a professional family, Kang Zhengguo is a free spirit, drawn to literature. In Mao's China, these innocuous circumstances expose him at age twenty to a fierce struggle session, expulsion from university, and a four-year term of hard labor. So begins his long stay in the prison-camp system. He finally escapes the Chinese gulag by forfeiting his identity: at age twenty-eight he is adopted by an aging bachelor in a peasant village, which enables him to start a new life.

Author: Kang Zhengguo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 06/01/2008
Pages: 480
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.50w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780393332001

About the Author
Zhengguo, Kang: - Kang Zhengguo is senior lector of Chinese at Yale University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.Wilf, Susan: - Susan Wilf teaches at George School in Pennsylvania and was awarded a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Confessions.