After the Bitter Comes the Sweet

After the Bitter Comes the Sweet: How One Woman Weathered the Storms of China's Recent History by Yulin Wang Rittenberg with Dori Jones Yang, East West Insights, 2015.

Yulin’s father was a wood carver and furniture maker. When the author was little, her family fled Beijing to avoid the Japanese invasion. Her older sister was beautiful and was raped by a Japanese soldier. Her mother’s feet had been bound as a child, starting at age 3. Nevertheless, she had to drag corpses at a Japanese military hospital. They later moved to Shijiazhuang, where her brother repaired watches. The author scavenged coal clay brick stove that her father had built. After the Japanese were defeated, the KMT took control of her city. The KMT behave badly, which made her turn to the Communists. She joined the Communist Youth League in 1948. In 1950 she joined the Communist Party. In 1951 she started working for Radio Peking. This is where she met her future husband, Sidney Rittenberg, an American Jew, who spoke fluent Mandarin. Her husband was a friend of Premier Zhou Enlai and Anna Louise Strong. During the Cultural Revolution, her husband was accused of being an American secret agent and imprisoned. 

During the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the author was part of a gang called the Kang Da Battalion, which fought with the Red Banner Battalion to become the true followers of Chairman Mao. Later, she was sent for a year to the May Seventh Cadre School at Fangshan for Reform through Labor. Being a white-collar worker, the Communists felt she needed to know what it was like to work with her hands. She was assigned to making clay bricks. She spent a second year at a forced labor camp in Henan Province, where she pulled wheelbarrows full of bricks with a rope across her chest. She was pressured to denounce her husband as being a spy for the United States, but she never did.