Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was started by Mao Tse-tung in 1966 and did not conclude until after his death in 1976, is referred to officially by the current government of China as haojie; as GAO Mobo notes that "haojie is ambiguous because it can be a modern term for 'holocaust' or a traditional term to mean 'great calamity' or 'catastrophe'." (Gao 15). To some extent, those who lived through the Chinese Cultural Revolution, such as my grandparents, are uncomfortable with discussion of the effects. As a small child, I had often wondered what happened in China in the 1960s and 1970s that my grandparents refused to discuss it, or discuss their lives before emigration, first to Taiwan, then to America. But this was just one of the peculiarities of my "F.O.B." ("Fresh Off the Boat") grandparents, to use a term that sometimes recurs in Chinese-American conversations -- for example, they...
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