Crossing the Bamboo Curtain: Occidentalism and the English Language in Cultural Revolution Memoirs

In the late 1980s and 1990s, a stream of Cultural Revolution memoirs written by Chinese dissident writers became bestsellers in the U.S., the U.K., and other countries in the Anglosphere. Travelling through transnational circuits of exchange made possible by a multinational publishing industry, Cultural Revolution memoirs were promoted as authentic cultural productions that documented the hardships of life under Communism. This article situates the Anglophone Cultural Revolution memoir in a global Cold War framework. Drawing on theories of Occidentalism, I discuss how English language acquisition is invoked in Anglophone Cultural Revolution memoirs as a pathway towards achieving individual freedom. Through formalist readings, I demonstrate how two emblematic Cultural Revolution memoirs - Da Chen's Colors of the Mountain and Jung Chang's Wild Swans - establish their narrators as liberal subjects through the process of learning English, thereby elevating the central figure of the dissident who crosses the Bamboo Curtain and seeks a new life in the West.