AustLit

Growing up in China under Chairman Mao, the author was a student in Beijing when she began to believe that her idealistic view of Mao's revolution was flawed. In 1966 she was sent to Jinzhou province, where she had a dead-end job in a chemicals factory for five years. Here she married and had her first child. She and her husband were branded as counter-revolutionaries and frequently sent to the 'black' room after work, but in 1973 they managed to get away and get work at the new Institute of Plasma Physics at Hefei. She later came to Australia to work at the ANU as an exchange scientist, and after the events of Tiananmen Square she and her husband decided to stay in Australia.