Amei Li grew up in Red China, the daughter of a former business owner In this memoir she describes the austerity of the Great Hunger (officially the Great Leap Forward) and the later the terror and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Instead of studying medicine at university she was sent, with millions of others, to the country to “learn from the peasants”. In a remote village she met two ‘rightist’ scholars, exiled a decade earlier, who became her private tutors in English and the great books of Western literature. Eventually she was able to return to her family in Beijing where she became a first-hand witness to the massacre at Tianenmen Square.