I have read plenty of non-fiction accounts of Chinese history, including quite a number that touch on the period of Mao's rule. Life Under Mao Zedong's Rule, an autobiographical novel by Da-Peng Zhang, gave me a fresh window into a world that, from a Western point of view, was often cruel, nightmarish and entirely inexplicable.

The protogonist Xiaoping, whose only crime was to be born to "bourgeois" parents, and separated from those parents at a young age, must make his way through the labyrinthine world of Maoist China, a world that was subject to the whims, theories, hatreds and vast narcissism of the Chairman.

Worse then the terrible struggle sessions and tales of despair and suicide was the manner in which a decent, cultured people with a deep history could be so turned into such a cowed and suspicious nation, with little or no respect for age, tradition or human life. Over two-thousand years of continuous social and cultural tradition was turned on it's head, not in a forward-looking, reform-minded way, but rather, in an iconoclastic, burn-the-house-down manner. Xiaoping, himself the victim of struggles and discrimination, chronicles the chaos and sheer uncertainty of everyday life.

It is not all doom and gloom though - there are love stories to be told - and there are tales of endurance and victory. In the end, another Xiaoping rides in to the rescue, consigning much of Mao's legacy to the dustbin of history.

Something of Xiaoping's struggle remains with me still, though I feel that the experience of reading a book like this one, something quite Kafkaesque, is more like looking through a glass, darkly.