Reviews:《Jia thinks》,《My memoir of youth》,《How we decide》
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-24 09:50
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My Memoir of Youth
By Chen Kaige, published by China Renmin University Press
Following the enthusiastic response to the biographical film, Forever Enthralled (Mei Lanfang), in December last year, China's leading film director has come out with Volume 1 of his autobiography, My Memoir of Youth. It wows readers with its nuanced writing, evocative descriptions and thoughtful reflections.
This is not the first autobiographical work by China's only Palme-d'Or-winning film director (Farewell My Concubine, 1993). Chen described his teenage years in My Red Guard Era published in Japan in 1989, which won the prize for Best Autobiography that year. Twelve years later, the sensational book was renamed Young Kaige: a Soul-Searching Memoir and was finally published in China.
Young Kaige comprises the main body of My Memoir of Youth but comes with more than 100 selected photos and the film director's studio notes. The new book spans six years, starting from 1965 when Chen began to study at Beijing No 4 Middle School at the age of 13, to 1971 when he ended his compulsory "re-education" in the countryside of Yunnan province and returned to Beijing.
It is more a book of those times than of a teenager called Chen Kaige, writes the director, as it depicts the frustration of an innocent boy caught at the height of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and shows his gradual maturation.
In the book, Chen confronts the hatred of his youth and his regret is tinged with much honesty. He talks about the terror of those times and how it influenced him and his career.
"I believe that my personal experience of life began in those days," he writes in the book. "Most importantly, the 'revolution' helped me understand myself and to understand oneself is to understand the world."
Some people feel Chen is more a professional writer than a film director. His book reveals a fantastic observer and recorder of people and events, not often seen in the autobiographies of other showbiz celebrities. The powerful and in-depth storytelling draws readers into the narrative.
For fans of Farewell My Concubine, the book has Chen Kaige's photos taken of him with the late Hong Kong actor Leslie Cheung (Cheng Dieyi in Farewell) by Timmy Yip (Kam Tim Yip), now a renowned designer. Some of the photos have been published for the first time. Many other photographs show Chen's early life, before he joined the Beijing Film Academy.
