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At twelve years old, Bing became a Red Guard—and for a few intoxicating months, he felt invincible.
Growing up in Mao’s Beijing, Bing was taught to worship Chairman Mao, recite the Little Red Book and attack the old order. But the Cultural Revolution soon turned against his own family.
His parents were condemned and sent to labour in the countryside, his grandmother was driven from Beijing, and Bing was left to care for his nine-year-old sister after she suffered a devastating injury during a Red Guard raid.
Later conscripted into the People’s Liberation Army, Bing endured brutal conditions in Manchuria while preparing for a possible Soviet invasion just twenty miles from the border.
His extraordinary journey would eventually take him from an oilfield and a reopened Chinese university to America—where he fulfilled his grandmother’s dying wish by reuniting a family divided by the Chinese Civil War decades earlier.
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