“But like many dreams of many Chinese people, mine was crushed, such that, in order to protect myself from becoming the target of an ongoing political campaign, the Anti-Rightist Purge, one that had already claimed my friends and colleagues, I burned my manuscript and scattered its ashes, like one does after a cremation.” – Yuan-tsung Chen

In Faust, Goethe wrote that “sons must win anew their fathers battles” – people cannot merely rest on the victories and knowledge of their ancestors. Wisdom is not easily imparted, and it is something of a tragedy that lessons must be relearned again and again by each succeeding generation. Yet humanity still stands on the shoulders of giants, with every generation desperately trying to communicate what wisdom they have gained to the next in the endeavor to save them from so much pain, grief and error. Yuan-tsung Chen aims to do just this. Having personally survived Mao’s Great Purges and Cultural Revolution, she is observing history being both repeated and wiped away.

To do her duty against this cyclical tide, she produced her autobiography, The Secret Listener: An Ingenue in Mao’s Court. While she considers the book a life-long work, China’s Cultural Revolution forced her into delays, and she only recently ensured its production in lieu of the recent Hong Kong protests. Yuan-tsung Chen was born in Shanghai, “then the Paris of the East,” in 1929. Through her father’s connections, then later prestigious marriage and positions in the Communist cultural ministry, she was able to see behind the curtain of the many devastating acts of Mao Zedong’s regime.

Chen discovered an early passion for literature and film and envisioned herself as a writer at a young age, but she mistakenly believed she would be a lucky exception and be permitted to thrive in Mao’s China: “Yes, the Communists were well known for killing creativity, but my siblings made me believe that I could succeed where others had failed.”  This dream is especially shattered when she sees Hu Feng, a renowned critic, stand up to and later be persecuted by the regime. She learns that little of what can be considered art is permitted, for it wasn’t merely writing that was suppressed, but film as well: “Film, with its mass appeal, was considered the most important propaganda tool, and to be ideologically correct every film had to be based on an ideologically correct script.” These principles came from Mao’s talks in Yan’an in 1942: “The unaltered principles were that (1) all art should portray the revolutionary masses and (2) all art should advance the cause of the socialist revolution.”

She eventually moves to Beijing and takes a position at the Central Film Bureau. At one point during her career there, a man accused of being a spy rapes a woman. The victim is later interrogated for her relation to the supposed spy and is forced to relive the moment again and again. Chen consoles the woman – which, in China’s Communist culture, naturally places herself in danger as well. Her boss discovers this ‘incident,’ and he informs her that her life is indeed in jeopardy and that she desperately needs “political capital” if she is to survive. Chen is then relocated to the northwest, where “For the next six months, my job was consciousness-raising among the village women. With a burst of oratorical fervor, I encouraged them to fight for their own rights, land, and equality. I expected them to roar back in approval. To my disappointment, they drifted away as if having watched a street performance they couldn’t quite comprehend. Everything was predestined, all their hardships and oppression. Dynasties changed again and again, but poor people remained poor. This was a mandated truth from heaven.”

Later, she is taken to an opera as a date with a well-connected man – so well-connected that the pair is seated next to Zhou Enlai, the man who was effectively Mao’s ‘number two,’ serving as China’s first “Premier” – or Prime Minister. While her conversations with Enlai are brief, she notices how different his private nature is from his public persona. Shortly after, she is invited to watch a debate between Mao and Liang Shumin – a debate that much of China was eagerly awaiting as it will inform what the political climate and future of their government will be. While it is initially civil, Mao gradually loses his patience and explodes at his opponent. In the months to come, the debate and further prosecutions are revealed to have confirmed the populace’s fears: “…Its purpose was to warn us that from now on there will be zero tolerance for dissent.”

But in 1956, three years after the debate, it appears that the opposite is true, and Chen discovers she may finally write in earnest. Unexpectedly, Mao and the party had created a new policy titled “Letting a Hundred Flowers Bloom and Letting a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend,” more commonly referred to as the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Chen writes: “It affirmed the principle that people should have full freedom of speech and expression, that they should be allowed to criticize the Party, to point out its shortcomings, and that there would be no more crackdowns on dissidents.” Her friends and colleagues debate the earnestness of the campaign, cautiously celebrating after hearing that they will soon even allow non-Communist publishing houses to open. In 1957, Chen finishes her first manuscript for a novel, wherein a teenage protagonist has doubts about Mao’s Yan’an talk and its principles. She sends the manuscript to her sister, who sends it to a publisher in Shanghai. At long last, Chen was able to realize her dream of being a writer.

So she thought. The Hundred Flowers Campaign is soon revealed to be a trap: Mao had used free speech as bait so that his enemies could be identified, and his real purges could begin: “Once they had exposed themselves, Mao had said, he would strike back at them so fast and hard that they would have no time to realize what was happening.” The Anti-Rightist Campaign, as it is historically called, is initiated and claims at least 550,000 casualties. Mao believed that “counterrevolutionaries comprised 5 percent of China’s population, and as his purges picked up steam, that number came to be treated as sacred. It became a quota, a target to be reached by party officials as they ferreted out counterrevolutionaries, to be exceeded for extra credit.” With her critical manuscript in a publisher’s hands, Chen’s life is in grave danger.

She burns all that remains of her writing still in her possession and, for the near future, manages to elude becoming a victim of the purge. Chen marries in 1958, but she and her husband are sent to live in slums as punishment for her husband’s elite status. It is there that she recounts her experiences of going to great lengths to smuggle a mere pig, buying mutton on the black market and witnessing the effects of the Great Leap Forward’s famine firsthand. She eventually conceives a new dream – to flee to Hong Kong. It is only finally in 1971 that she and her husband are able to escape. Chen largely remained in Hong Kong through the present day, though she briefly immigrated to the United States, working as a library assistant for the University of California. It is during her time there that she found the connections to publish this book through the Oxford University Press.

There is, naturally, a question of memory. Yuan-tsung Chen is recounting these memories decades after they have transpired. Dialogues and conversations are relived so long after the fact, leaving the reader to ask to what extent it reflects reality. Are they to be taken seriously at face value? Or – is that the wrong question? Is casting too much doubt effectively blaming the victim? To have written “truth” during Mao’s reign was a death sentence – or worse. The modus operandi of 20^th century Communist nations was to ensure anything that contradicted government propaganda was severely punished with imprisonment or death; it was the talking points of the party that were to be accepted as truth and historical fact, not lived experience and reality. While she may have escaped and survived the purge, Mao’s legacy nevertheless claimed countless victories by coercing writers like Chen to reduce their record to dust.

On June 30 of 2020, China unanimously passed the National Security Law, a broadly termed, vague decree that effectively allowed the government to grant itself power to arrest whoever they please. The law enables China to arrest and punish any and all who “endanger national security” – a concept left broad enough that anyone who is critical of the Chinese government can be imprisoned. Arrests were made for owning a flag or t-shirt. Journalists, lawyers, academics and activists were charged and thrown into prison. Using or possessing an item that bears a ‘dangerous’ slogan such as, in the eyes of China’s government, “Liberate Hong Kong,” is a prosecutable crime.

In the face of China’s whitewashing of its history, and its repetition of its worst, tyrannical qualities, Chen wants to make a stand: “All my life I have been waiting for China to be allowed to face its Maoist past bravely and unflinchingly, and especially to restore the humanity of its victims. But rather than allow the faces of the past to reemerge, the Party authorities are further obliterating them… To me, this is personal, not abstract. I went through the purges. I witnessed events up close.”