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Summary
Summary
"I was born in southern China in 1962, in the tiny town of Yellow Stone. They called it the Year of Great Starvation." In 1962, as millions of Chinese citizens were gripped by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards enforced a brutal regime of communism, a boy was born to a poor family in southern China. This family--the Chens--had once been respected landlords in the village of Yellow Stone, but now they were among the least fortunate families in the country, despised for their "capitalist" past. Grandpa Chen couldn't leave the house for fear of being beaten to death; the children were spit upon in the street; and their father was regularly hauled off to labor camps, leaving the family of eight without a breadwinner. Da Chen, the youngest child, seemed destined for a life of poverty, shame, and hunger. But winning humor and an indomitable spirit can be found in the most unexpected places.Colors of the Mountainis a story of triumph, a memoir of a boyhood full of spunk, mischief, and love. The young Da Chen is part Horatio Alger, part Holden Caul-field; he befriends a gang of young hoodlums as well as the elegant, elderly Chinese Baptist woman who teaches him English and opens the door to a new life. Chen's remarkable story is full of unforgettable scenes of rural Chinese life: feasting on oysters and fried peanuts on New Year's Day, studying alongside classmates who wear red armbands and quote Mao, and playing and working in the peaceful rice fields near his village. Da Chen's story is both captivating and endearing, filled with the universal human quality that distinguishes the very best memoirs. It proves once again that the concerns of childhood transcend time and place.
Author Notes
Da Chen was a brilliant story teller who wrote about the hardships he suffered as a child growing up in the middle of China's Cultural Revolution. As a child he was forced to watch both his father and grandfather often beaten and stoned in public.
After Mao's death in 1976, Da Chen took the country's college entrance exam, on which he scored among the highest in the country. He was admitted to the prestigious Beijing Language and Culture University; upon graduation he joined the faculty teaching English. Offered a scholarship to Nebraska's Union College, Da Chen arrived in the United States with little more than $30 and a bamboo flute. He supported himself as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant." He then received a scholarship offer from Columbia University in New York City.
Da Chen earned a law degree, then worked as an investment banker on Wall Street. He tried his hand at writing a legal thriller, but was unsuccessful. After his second attempt, his wife suggested he write the stories he'd told his family about his early years in China. The result was "Colors of the Mountain". His other books include Sounds of the River; Brothers: A Novel; Wandering Warrior; and his most recent work, Girl Under a Red Moon.
Da Chen passed away on December 17, 2019 at the age of 57.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The grandchild of a former landlord--China's most spat-upon class after the Revolution--Chen was regularly beaten to a pulp by other children and, despite performing at the top of his class, repeatedly denied the right to continue at school. His family of nine--including his brother, three sisters, grandparents and parents--subsisted on moldy yams alone for entire winters. Meanwhile, his grandfather was attacked randomly by neighbors and forced by the local authorities to guard lumber and tend fields. Chen's father, with his prerevolutionary college education, eventually managed to extract himself from the labor camps by becoming skilled in acupuncture (he used the biggest needles on the hated "cadres"). At the climax of this survival story, Chen, the book's first-person narrator, and his older brother, Jin, both compete in China's first nationwide, open educational tests in 1977: "We were out to make a point. The Chen family had been dragged through the mud for the last forty years.... Now it was time." Scoring among the top 2% of the country, the 14-year-old Chen achieved his dream of attending Beijing Language Institute. According to the epilogue, after graduating with high honors, he wound up in New York at age 23, where he won a scholarship to attend Columbia Law School, and later landed a job on Wall Street and married a doctor. Despite the devastating circumstances of his childhood and adolescence, Chen recounts his coming of age with arresting simplicity. Readers will cry along with this sad, funny boy who proves tough enough to make it, every step of the painful way. Agent, Elaine Koster. 5-city author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A moving evocation of life in a remote village in China in the 1960s and '70s. The Chens had the misfortune to be descended from a landlord, and the consequences followed all the descendants, even the grandchildren, as ineluctably as race in the worst days of the old South. Their property was confiscated, they were forbidden to go to school, they could be abused and beaten up with impunity by their neighbors, their father was sent to a work camp, and most of the children worked for long hours in the fields, ``farming the land the same way we had done thousands of years ago, the only difference being that we got paid less.' And yet, for all the cruelty and humiliation, there is an exuberance about this book. The Chens' remote village escaped'was hardly even aware of'the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, China itself was changing. Chen was allowed to go to school, and even though he was persecuted and victimized, and on one occasion had to escape to another village to avoid being branded a counterrevolutionary, his school and village took occasional pride in his achievements. Chen taught himself to play the violin and consorted with local toughs who discouraged the school bullies. All the while, his family, even by Chinese standards, remained exceptionally loving and supportive. His father's talent for acupuncture was so helpful to the party hierarchy that he was discharged from the work camp, credited with a miraculous repentance. Chen's triumph comes after the Cultural Revolution, when college places are opened up to competitive examinations, regardless of class status, and he wins the supreme prize of a place at the Beijing Language Institute. Chen's memoir displays an unusual and remarkable insight into Chinese life, and into the resilience of the human spirit. (Author tour)
Booklist Review
While he was a young boy growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China, Chen's family, because of many centuries as members of the dreaded landlord class, was maligned under the leadership of Chairman Mao. At a young age, he was introduced to the hatred and prejudice of the people in his small hometown. The narrative begins with Chen as a young boy eager to attend the local school. Despite showing promise as a student, Chen's schoolmates and principal attempt to break his spirit because of his family's past. He makes friends with the "bad" crowd, which does not help his already sullied reputation. His adventures growing up include buying tickets off the black market to see his first movie, filling in for his sister at a factory for a summer, and learning English from one of his father's acupuncture patients. With the encouragement of his family, he continues to study, while his siblings toil in the rice fields. Chen's autobiography is a detailed and delightful account of one boy's reaching for his dream. --Julia Glynn
Choice Review
Chen's book is a vivid personal account of a family ordeal in communist China, reflecting the course of the rise and demise of Mao's Chinese revolution. Chen was born into a former landlord's family in Yellow Stone, a small village in southern China. When he was a child, he saw his father, perceived as a "class enemy" because of his family background, humiliated and purged by communist authorities. Instead of growing up in an environment replete with intimidation, horror, and poverty, Chen found friendship and support from a group of young friends. Further, he learned English from an elderly Baptist woman who helped open a window for him to look into a much larger and more colorful world. This experience prepared him eventually to succeed in a nationwide college entrance examination after Mao's death, qualifying him to become a student in one of the best institutions of higher education in China. After he came to the US, he became a graduate of Columbia University Law School. The strength of Chen's tale lies in its tremendous sense of humanity. It shows that even one of the most destructive revolutions in history is unable to destroy basic human dignity and love. All levels. J. Chen; Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Library Journal Review
Over the past few years, Chinese memoirs dealing with adolescence in Communist China, written mostly by women who subsequently moved to the United States, have proliferated. These include Anchee Min's Red Azalea, Jaia Sun-Childers's The White-Haired Girl: Bittersweet Adventures of a Little Red Soldier, and Rae Yang's Spider Eaters. This work, written by a young man who came of age after the Cultural Revolution, is similar in some respects: Chen's bourgeois family was persecuted by the state, and he eventually left China to live in the United States. But Chen's story is different from the others because he grew up in rural, not urban, China. It carries an easily recognizable theme (boy falls in with hoodlums, then pulls himself up to succeed against all odds), which is at once uplifting and unsatisfying. Chen, who attended Columbia University Law School on a full scholarship and has worked on Wall Street, has written a clear and fast-moving book, but readers looking for either a modest narrator or a way to make sense of recent events in China will be disappointed.ÄPeggy Spitzer Christoff, Oak Park, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.