Oriental Girls Desire Romance A novel by Catherine Liu Book Description . About the Author . Excerpt . Reviews . Events . Buy Books Now It was the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, and even in New York, the Chinese got drunk on political slogans. [My brother and I] attended Marxist reading groups with [my father] in New York City lofts and we played and ran around with the other kids until we were dizzy. Then we would go to the Museum of Holography and look at the holographs. We would walk up and down the block until we were tired and then come back to the loft where the grown ups would still be talking and arguing. Soho was filled with empty buildings and struggling artists. There was one lonely liquor store on West Broadway. It was an exciting time. We wanted to watch TV, but it would have disturbed the meeting, so I would try to imagine what the episode of Starsky and Hutch we were missing might have looked like. I remember that my parents participated in a production of The East is Red, a revolutionary opera that told the story of the Communist victory in China. They sang in the chorus. I remember the lyrics of the opening choral number being something like, the Yellow River is boiling over, the horses are straining at their bits. The Communists are streaming through the land. Victory is at hand. The Light of Chairman Mao will shine through the country. The People's Liberation Army are vigorous, brave, incorruptible, and selfless. They love the People. Despite the fact that most of the Overseas Chinese who participated in this kind of activism were very well educated and well established in the American middle class, they accepted that intellectuals were to be criticized for being too easily seduced and corrupted by Western ways. The writings and teachings of Chairman Mao had value because they were based on the Marxist principles of dialectical materialism crossed with the common sense of the Chinese peasant. Anyone with a bit of sophistication was condemned. We were all supposed to be simple and perhaps even a bit simple-minded. My mother found this newly acquired ideology the perfect justification to begin persecuting me for my increasing bookishness. She had always been ashamed of her lack of a college education; now because of Mao Zedong Thought, she turned her lack into an asset. There she was on the side of the uneducated worker-peasant-soldiers. I played the role of a despised lackey of the bourgeoisie. This was class struggle in my family. It was around this time that I began to concentrate on becoming a really good maid. I felt that I had to acquire housekeeping skills because it was the only way I was going to get any kind of familial love. It was only at night, under the safety of darkness that I felt safe. In the light of day, I had to make myself as much like a worker-peasant-soldier as possible.