The white-haired girl

Jaia Sun-Childers was a young child at the beginning of one of the most dramatic episodes in human history, the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In this exquisitely crafted memoir, the personal and historic events that shaped Jaia's life and country come alive.

A toddler when the Cultural Revolution erupted, at age five Jaia accompanied her "Stinking Ninth Category Intellectual" Mama to a labor camp in desolate Hu Bei Province. Back in Beijing several years later, they were reunited with Jaia's extraordinary father, a war hero before liberation, now a con man living by his wits. Jaia spent her school years determined to be a revolutionary warrior and "Chairman Mao's best kid," while the lives of those closest to her revealed the futility of her childhood dream: her sweet, loyal Uncle Sea, a brilliant musician sentenced to hard labor for a harmless remark; her irrepressible schoolmate Little Plum, whose willful impulse to freedom would have devastating consequences; and her first love, Yangtze, a celebrated poet-martyr of the 1976 Tiananmen Square Clear Light Rebellion. Finally, at the age of twenty-one - disillusioned and dismayed by the state of China - Jaia left the country of her birth for the United States.