ABSTRACT
All of my friends from my childhood have stories about the Cultural Revolution and what it did to their lives. Unlike others of our generation, those with the working-class and peasant backgrounds that allowed them to join the Red Guards, as children of parents in the Black categories we were disempowered by the Cultural Revolution, stripped of our dignity and our futures. Some of us have managed to salvage something of a present from the tatters of our lives that we were left with at the end of the 1970s, but none of us is whole. Many of us lost one or both of our parents to the excesses of the Red Guards or to the harsh conditions of the reform through labor camps. All of us lost precious years when we could and should have been studying for our life's work. Now in our thirties and forties, we struggle to catch up, to make up for that lost time.
