Nests With No Birds; A starkly vivid memoir of life in Mao's China.(Feather in the Storm)(Book review)

Byline: Susan Szeliga

Emily Wu grew up in Maoist China, a place where lives were steered by the political winds. But in her vivid new memoir, "Feather in the Storm" (336 pages. Pantheon Books), she gives those forces names and faces, hands and voices. It's the difference between knowing that 38 million people died during the four years of Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward, and knowing that one night a starving little boy was slowly fed, as candy, a small squirt of toothpaste by his older sister.

At the start of Wu's tale, her father--a professor of English who had studied in America--has just been released from prison, where he had been held as an "anti-revolutionary intellectual." Three-year-old Wu, who had been living with her grandmother, is spirited back to Hefei to join her mother and brothers. The family has been labeled "black" for their "rightist or anti-revolutionary leanings." Unable to join the Communist Party, they are subject to suspicion, random humiliation and even torture. When the student Red Guards seize power, they revel in tormenting former teachers and landowners as part of their "ideological cleansing." Wu's parents have little choice but to express a sincere desire to be reformed and to keep as low a profile as possible. Education degenerates to the rote memorization of quotations from Mao's Little Red Book; works considered bourgeois, such as "Gulliver's Travels" and "David Copperfield," are burned or used as toilet paper.

Throughout the narrative, co-written with Larry Engelmann, the simple yet exquisite details of Wu's life create a layered, broad ...