Red Roulette By Shum Desmond-pdfread.net

I was born big and grew fast. I was worthy of my Chinese given name, Dong,
which means “pillar.” My size—I top out at six- ve—and athleticism made me a
natural leader among my peers. My parents also cultivated in me a love of
reading. From my earliest days, I had the best collection of comics about Chinese
mythical gures, the heroes of China’s Communist revolution, and China’s war
against Japan. Raised on stories of Xiao Gazi, a kid who picked up a gun to kill
Japanese invaders during World War II, I was naturally patriotic—and fond of
storytelling. My gang of friends would crowd around to hear me recount those
tales. I’d make others up as I went along. I still remember concocting a madcap
adventure about a cave opening up to swallow the motorcade of a Chinese
general.
Those comics, full of stories of people sacri cing themselves for the
motherland and the Communist revolution, nurtured in me a deep love of
China. They set the tone for my later life and fed a belief that I, too, should
devote myself to building China. I was taught to see China as a great country,
and to believe in its promise.
In Shanghai, we lived in the same house that Communist authorities had
expropriated from my dad’s father in 1952. It was an English-style row house on
a lane o Huaihai Middle Road, a main boulevard in the old French
Concession, a leafy district that before the revolution of 1949 had been
administered by civil servants from Paris as part of France’s imperial empire. The
Communists often directed erstwhile property owners to live in a small corner
of their old home, again a deliberate tactic to demonstrate the awesome power of
the state.
We were allotted two rooms on the second oor. A doctor and his family
occupied my grandfather’s old living room on the rst oor. The doctor had
studied in England before the revolution and his at over owed with foreign
medical journals. A family of distant relatives lived above us on the third oor.
All ten people in the house shared a bathroom and a kitchen. One of Shanghai’s
premier bakeries was located around the corner and at all hours the tantalizing
smell of baked bread wafted down our lane.
My parents slept on a double bed in one corner of our room. I had a single
bed in another. A chest of drawers separated us. A small desk with our prized