Red Fire

the long version

"In August 1966, a 14-year-old boy in Beijing is thrust into violence and chaos as Mao Ze-dong's Cultural Revolution begins to blaze across China. In this riveting memoir, Wei Yang Chao now tells his story--how rebels attacked and publicly humiliated his family, upended his education, and sent out of a country rendered unrecognizable by violence and radical ideology. At first he is swept up by the Red Guards but finds himself at the center of a bloody revolution. After mass rallies at Tiananmen Square, he witnesses attacks on teachers and professors, and the disintegration of his parents' lives as tolerance and freedom begin to crumble he finds himself cast into exile"--Amazon.com.