Chun Yu

Chun Yu was born at the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. She grew up during a time of change, which would make for a difficult childhood. Everything she experienced, she detailed in beautiful poems.

This text is a different kind of primary source for readers. The poetry gives a more personal look at what it would be like to grow up during a time of radical change. Readers of any age will learn a lot about a new culture and time by reading this book.

This memoir, written in verse, starts out with the birth of Xiao Qing, or Little Green, in China in 1966. LIttle Green was born at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, and shortly after her birth her father was sent away to a peasant village to be reeducated. She, her mother, and her younger brother, Gege, are left behind to navigate this new world filled with humiliation, reeducation, counterrevolutionaries, and school indoctrination. As Little Green grows, she begins to understand more show more and more about the world around her. The story follows her life until she turns ten and Chairman Mao dies. An epilogue and a glossary provide some background information for the readers.

There are black-and-white photos of Xiao Qing and her family interspersed throughout the text. These normal family photographs juxtapose the harshness of the realities they faced during the revolution. show less