Review | Horror, madness, escape: a Chinese-Australian’s memoir of living through Mao’s great famine and Red Guard terror
- Even as a kindergartener, Kwong could feel his family being shunned for the fact that they were well-educated teachers and therefore considered ‘bourgeois’
- His book about surviving childhood horrors and achieving the immigrant dream bears comparison with Frank McCourt’s visceral memoir Angela’s Ashes
One Bright Moon by Andrew Kwong, HarperCollins. 5/5 stars
This powerful, sometimes brutal memoir, spanning half a century of Chinese history and migration, is the surprise debut of a family doctor who has published his first book at the age of nearly 70.
Andrew Kwong has lived a peaceful life on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, but he could not shake memories of his traumatic childhood in China, his flight as a refugee to Hong Kong and his escape overseas.
So, for a few hours each morning before work, he would write his recollections, at first only to document them for his children and grandchildren. “I exhumed those confronting times I had long buried,” he writes.
The result is One Bright Moon, a work of startling clarity and humanity. In some ways, it is reminiscent of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), another memoir about surviving an impoverished childhood and achieving the immigrant dream.
