Standing Up to the Red Army
Growing Up in Maoist China
Jennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 12/13/2007
Hear Ying Chang Compestine read from Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party
The Chang family in 
Food has always been a theme in Ying Chang Compestine’s work because, she jokes, “I never got enough to eat.” She says that’s why she writes cookbooks and why her picture books all lead to a recipe. But in her novel, Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party (Holt, 2007), based on her childhood experiences in Maoist China during the years 1972-1976, the author offers a more somber explanation for “never having enough,” through the eyes of her heroine, young Ling.
The title of the book comes from Mao’s words, which the character Ling is forced to memorize in school. While Mao’s doctrine suggested a call to violence, Ling’s father, a surgeon, lived by the physician’s creed, often operating on the very men who threw him in jail for antirevolutionary sympathies. It was a time when people “drew a class line” against parents, siblings, or friends, delivering them into the hands of Mao’s Red Guards. In the novel, the neighbor boy Niu betrays Ling’s father to the Red Army. Unlike many children who grow up under a Communist regime, Ling never accepts its message. Here Compestine talks about her own experiences growing up under Mao’s rule.
Why did you decide to write Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party as a novel, rather than a memoir?
The main reason [I wrote the book as fiction] is because the character Niu was based on one of our neighbors and my elder brother. I didn’t want to hurt [my brother]. I was nine and a half when he came home and told my parents he wanted to draw a class line against them. For years I was very angry.
Last summer, after I finished the book, I went back to China and stayed with my brother and his family for three days. For the first time, we talked about why he did what he did. At the time, my brother [was 19 and] wanted to join the Red Army. He passed all the exams, which was a really hard process. On the day they were going to give everyone a uniform, someone reported that my father was an American spy, and my brother was not allowed in the Army, [or] … in the high school. All his life he [has been] a factory worker and has lived a very difficult life.
Now I can understand much better why my brother did what he did. He took care of my parents day and night [while they were ill] until they died. My father forgave him.
Other books on this period in history, such as Ji-li Liang’s Red Scarf Girl (HarperCollins, 1997), and Peter Sís’s The Wall (Farrar, 2007), feature a child who has been swept up in the Communist agenda, and who then grows critical of the oppressive government. But Ling starts out skeptical of Mao’s teachings. Was that true for you?
My mother often told me, “Sometimes you have to bend like bamboo in the wind.” I can’t. I have to be myself. Often I wonder if my life would have been easier if I’d bent like a bamboo in the wind a little bit, like Red Scarf Girl.
My story—that really happened to me. I always questioned. I cannot pretend to believe what I don’t believe. That’s what got me into a lot of trouble. Even when I went back to China last summer, my best friends laughed at me, saying, “If you’d stayed in China you’d probably be in and out of jail many times.” I’m so happy to be in this country, to say what I believe, and to write this book.
In the novel, the growing sense of understanding and intimacy between Ling and her mother—which does not start out as an easy relationship—is very poignant.
I was always closer to my father than my mother. Whenever I had something to talk about, I went to him. My father had a Western education; he was very open-minded. I studied English from the time I was seven, just like Ling in the book. We’d close the curtains and [my father would] teach me English. My brothers weren’t interested. In most Chinese families, the son is most important. But in our family it was the opposite. I was always the most important child in the family. My father really loved me. That may also be because my brothers bought into the communist system, and I never did.
My mother was brought up like a traditional woman doing fan dances and not laughing too loud, and I didn’t want to buy into her ideas. I wanted to live freely. After my father went to jail, my mother went through a lot of difficulty. She always had headaches. I didn’t understand that until I became a mother, and I thought, “What if my husband was taken away?” My mother was constantly pressured to divorce my father, to draw a class line, but she stayed faithful to him and did whatever she could to free him. I made peace with her.
One of the most painful points in the novel was when Ling’s father went from saying “Smart children always ask questions” to saying, “Children don’t have to know everything.” Is that last statement something your father said to you after Mao took over, as a way of protecting you?
At the beginning, my relationship with my father was very open, but as things heated up, he hid things from me. He was very worried that I would accidentally say something at school [that would compromise our situation].
I’m very extroverted, I love to talk, but I remember that during the time [portrayed in the book], I was so afraid. My mother could see from her window into the courtyard. The compound, as I described it [in the book], is exactly the way it was. If I stopped and talked to someone, she’d ask me what I said. She would get very nervous.
This novel is such a dramatic break from your earlier titles. What inspired you to take on this project?
I struggled to write this novel, to overcome painful memories, and to write in a second language. For over six years, that was the purpose of my life. It was the first thing I did when I woke up and the last thing I did before I went to bed. It was a way for me to remember that part of my life.
I always wanted to live near the Golden Gate Bridge. For me, that was the heavenly place, that’s what my father described. I’m living my father’s dream.
Hear Ying Chang Compestine read from Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party
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