"Anyone wishing to be the architect of his or her own fortune would do well to study this amazing memoir, a testament to the human spirit."—ForeWord "While the general outlines of this account of growing up in Communist China will be familiar to readers of recent Chinese memoir, the details can still shock and astound. . . . [Shen] offers a snapshot of the political wiles needed to rebel against the fate one was assigned by the party: in order to both leave the abominable and oppressive conditions and to avoid persecution, Shen learned to feign political ardor, fabricate spy stories to confound the watchful authorities, pull strings with highly placed friends and falsify health tests. Though he might seem to overly relish these clever maneuvers, Shen's portrait of the social and political climate in China is unambiguous: power rested in the hands of a few and professed loyalty to party ideologies made it unsafe to trust anyone; the only way to win was to use the party's rules to one's own ends."—Publishers Weekly. "[A]
book of stunning power. . . . This book is full of death, and worse,
as mass sadism took hold of an entire country (the world's biggest).
But it is also full of humanity, and, at times, funny as hell. .
. . There is even, shockingly, a love story toward the end of the
book. It is as shocking and beautiful as that in 1984. Hypnotically
rendered, Gang of One is a high literary achievement, documenting
an even greater achievement . . . the life of this awe-inspiring
man, Fan Shen."—Jay Nordlinger,National
Review. In
1966 twelve-year-old Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged
happily into Gang
of One recounts how Shen escaped, again and
again, from his appointed fate, as when he somehow found himself
a doctor at sixteen and even, miraculously, saved a few lives. In
such volatile times, however, good luck could quickly turn to misfortune:
a transfer to the East Wind Aircraft Factory got him out of the
countryside and into another terrible trap, where many people were
driven to suicide; his secret self-education took him from the factory
to college, where friendship with an American teacher earned him
the wrath of the secret police. Following a path strewn with perils
and pitfalls, twists and surprises worthy of Dickens, Shen’s story
is ultimately an exuberant human comedy unlike any other. Fan
Shen is a professor of English at Rochester
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