Gao Liang Hua Zi 高粱花子

Description:

Gao Liang was born in the early fifties into a worker's family in a city in western China. Because a film studio stood next to their courtyard, he spent most of his childhood climbing walls and slipping through holes with his friends into the studio's prop warehouses and soundstages. He watched plenty of films but did not read many books. Gao Liang's father died early from a work accident, and his mother soon took to her bed, paralyzed. Though still a small boy, Gao Liang boasted that he could handle any household chore, often showing off in front of his friends and becoming their ever-ready helper. Gao Liang loved face and therefore endured needless hardship, yet he always had a ready argument. In those years, everything that seemed to have nothing to do with him caught up with him: the Great Leap Forward, the three years of natural disasters, socialist education, the Cultural Revolution — he was drawn into them all in a muddled way, helping the Zhang family smash their iron wok, leading the children to feast in the sweet potato fields, taking the blame for reactionary poems written by someone with a bad class background... In those years, on that street, in that small courtyard, everyone knew Gao Liang, and everyone said with utter sincerity: Gao Liang is a good man.