Border Blackland

"Looking back," writes Kaimei Zheng, "I realize that my family history is an intricate part of Chinese modern history."
In 1966, when she was thirteen, Kaimei Zheng saw Mao's infamous Cultural Revolution erupt across her homeland, drastically changing her family's fortunes. "Within days, black became white and white became black." Kaimei's scholar mother found herself labeled as an "authority on the capitalist road." And the privileged family she'd once been so proud of "suddenly was labeled 'black, ' sending us to the bottom level of society. Workers and peasants became China's first class citizens."
Zheng continues: "After two years of encouraging Red Guards to destroy old and western culture, Mao decided to send city youth to the vast countryside to learn from the peasants. It was the largest reverse migration in the history of mankind; population flowed from cities to the countryside. I, one of millions of others going elsewhere, happily went to the army farm at the northeast corner of China near Siberia, dreaming of becoming a brave soldier in the fields."
Zheng's well-wrought, fascinating, and beautiful memoir relates a vital journey, revealing how a fifteen year old girl survived in a rich, frozen land amid a harsh - sometimes brutal - political climate dominated by Orwellian "Thought Dissemination Teams" and the full weight of the Communist Party.