Review |

Horror, madness, escape: a Chinese-Australian’s memoir of living through Mao’s great famine and Red Guard terror

• Even as a kinder­gartener, Kwong could feel his family being shunned for the fact that they were well-educated teachers and therefore considered ‘bourgeois’
• His book about surviving childhood horrors and achieving the immigrant dream bears comparison with Frank McCourt’s visceral memoir Angela’s Ashes