A memoir of Andrew Kwong who managed to live through the 1960-1970's cultural revolution in China. He and his entire family were able to escape to Australia and the U.S.; mainly through hard work and education. It was a great book of the horrors of the revolution. Although a great memoir and I do admire the Kwong family, they would not have been near as successful without the help of relatives in Hong Kong, Macao, and Australia. The "real common" people who did not have those family members elsewhere to help, were doomed. Amazing to find out that food was so scarce that they urinated and defecated into ponds so that algae would grow and they could eat the algae. Some people also sold themselves for meat for money for their family. Just when they thought things were getting better, Tiananmen Square occurs. 352 pages ( )

With Refugee Week (19-25 June 2022) coming up this Sunday, this was a good time to read Andrew Kwong's memoir of a childhood in Mao Zedong's China, and his escape to freedom in Australia.

Winner of the the Michael Crouch Award for a debut work in the 2021 National Biography Awards, One Bright Moon refers to an image of hope that sustained the author's family through long years of hardship, oppression and separation. The memoir begins with the author's childhood in Shiqi, an administrative town in Zhongshan, not far from the South China Sea. At this time, his parents were denied work because they had been high school teachers in Hong Kong before the revolution in 1949, and thus were deemed high intellectuals. For them, their initial hope that the new China would bring opportunities and benefits for them all soon turned to dust when they had to share their house with strangers and no jobs were allocated to them. They were subjected to years of political persecution including compulsory nightly political meetings and re-education camps, and were reliant on money sent to them by Grandmother in Hong Kong.

Little Ah-mun (who renamed himself Andrew as a teenager) was born into the first pure proletariat generation.

On my first day at kindergarten in September 1954, I was proud to already know the revolutionary slogans, songs and jingles. I'd been born amid the drone of them, into a noisy world filled with enthusiasm for a good life and hatred for the evildoers, both local and foreign who had exploited China for centuries. Since infancy I'd been infused with cries of revolution, denunciation and the struggle for freedom — indeed, they were my first babbling words, and now I loved shouting them with the other children. The red stars on the flaps of our schoolbags shone in the morning sun and reflected in our happy faces. We were a sea of little soldiers in khaki, ready to conquer the bad world under Chairman Mao. (p.11)

School consisted of mainly shouting slogans and participating in communal projects such as The Four Pests campaign to support Mao's grand plans for development. But from half-heard worried conversations at home and the propaganda he was learning at school, Ah-mun soon discovered that his parents were not as progressive and communistic as he thought they were. In 1955 the District Head told Baba that he was a capitalist intellectual with an outdated education and this meant that there was no future for the family in China. It was this District Head who had the power to approve visas for the only places they could go: Hong Kong (then a British colony) and Macau (at that time a Portuguese territory but now an autonomous region on the south coast of China, across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong.) At five, (after bribes, of course) Ah-mun was approved to visit his grandmother in Hong Kong, but he was too homesick to stay there for long. It was not long after his return that he witnessed his first public execution of a 'class traitor'.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/06/14/one-bright-moon-by-andrew-kwong/ ( )