Memoirs are made of this

PUBLISHED ON THE mainland in January, banned in March, and an illegally distributed best-seller ever since. Zhang Yihe's memoir of the political disaster that befell her democrat father and his friends in the 1950s meets Franz Kafka's criteria for a good book: that it should serve as 'an axe on the frozen sea within us'.

Or as commissioning editor Wang Peiyuan of the Beijing-based People's Literature Publishing House puts it: 'It came as a gunshot in the night.' Wangshi bing buru yan (The Past is not Forgotten) is an elegy to a China that disappeared in the late 1950s, when Mao Zedong launched the Anti-Rightist movement. Its protagonists, all victims of Mao's leftist zeal, were members of independent, democratic parties that sprang up before the 1949 communist revolution, when the Communist Party was just one of many contending factions. All the protagonists collaborated with the party during the civil war, but they hoped China's future would be democratic. Zhang Bojun, the author's father, was a leader of the Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party, founded in 1930. He was also a key figure in the China Democratic League. Both parties exist today but have no political power.

In mainland China, where history is carefully controlled by the party and the suffering of past political campaigns is still largely banned from public discourse, Zhang's revelatory memoir of a vanished society that existed for a short time under the communists has had a stunning impact. 'I really, really like this book. I had no idea about the things that they talk about in it,' says one young reader, in a typical response.

The book has been hotly debated on bulletin boards and the publishers have received scores of letters of thanks. One, written on a postcard in an elderly person's hand, said simply: 'Please thank the author.'

The author ignores her notoriety, declining interviews with journalists from around the world. Released in 1979 after 10 years in jail, Zhang, 62, became an internationally recognised expert on traditional Chinese opera through her work at the China Art Research Academy. The most recent photograph of her in the book shows her in a Beijing apartment in the 1990s.

Her reticence stems partly from fears over the book ban, along with an old-fashioned Chinese intellectual distaste for self-publicity. Friends say Zhang believes everything she has to say is in the book. But her shyness also reflects the scars of decades of isolation that followed the humiliation of her father and his peers. Zhang writes in the preface to her book: 'I pick up a pen to write in order to find a reason, and the strength, to go on living.'