“Apart from the pain that I would cause my parents, there is another reason I hesitated to write this book: it is the embarrassment and shame that I felt when I reflected on what I had done during the years of the Cultural Revolution. I felt embarrassed and ashamed not because I had succumbed to the command of personal ambition and had used deceptive means to advance my personal goals, but because I had participated in a number of cruel and destructive actions while playing the little revolutionary. No doubt readers will find some of my actions cruel and detestable. They are indeed cruel and detestable, even though I did them mostly when I was still a naïve revolutionary who was taught that no action against an enemy was too cruel.”
—Fan Shen, Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard
