Niu-Niu was four years old when, amidst the rubble of charred books and tattered curtains that had been her comfortable "bourgeois" home, she watched in horror the mindless beating of her helpless parents, and saw them bloody and with shaven heads, taken away for what seemed like forever.

That traumatic day marked the end of Niu-Niu's innocent childhood. Two days after she was born, on May 16, 1966, Mao Zedung began his "Great Cultural Revolution," which caused untold suffering. Niu-Niu's "intellectual" family were among the tens of thousands of Chinese people cruelly persecuted and even murdered in the name of the "Social Revolution.".

For the next nine years, Niu-Niu's life became a nightmare in which human kindness and reason all but disappeared, where violence and hunger were the order of the day. Even after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when Niu-Niu attended university in Beijing, she found Chinese society rigid, puritanical and small-minded. This direct eyewitness account of one of the world's most shocking social upheavals is told vividly and compassionately. It is a chronicle readers will not forget.