The Revenge of Heaven information

The Revenge of Heaven, subtitled Journal of a young Chinese, narrates the story of a sixteen/seventeen year old high-school student from Amoy^[1] in Southern Fujian, People's Republic of China (PRC), written by two US-American scholars.

The student participated as a Red Guard in Mao Tse-tung's so-called Cultural Revolution from its inception. In July 1968,^[2] together with his second elder brother, he escaped to the Republic of China, Taiwan by swimming almost eight miles with the ebb current from Amoy to the offshore island Tatan which belongs to the Chinmen Archipelago. He subsequently attracted the attention of one of the Chinese assistants of Ivan D. London, psychologist and professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York in the United States of America (USA) who brought the former Red Guard into communication with him. Together with Miriam London, his wife and long-term collaborator, Professor London was conducting a large-scale research project on the social system of the PRC based upon refugee interviews. He followed up with the young man. Over the period of approximately 18 months the London's were able to collect source material from about 300 hours of interviews with him and additional statements he submitted in written form amounting to about 500 000 Chinese characters. When Professor London and his wife decided to publish the findings and research insights they had gained from that material, a pseudonym was required to protect their informant's family in the PRC. Having carefully studied their respondent during the 18 months of working increasingly closer with him they intended to present the former Red Guard to the public as "a real and genuine character"^[3] and, therefore, chose the autobiographical first person account with a narrator fictitiously reading from his journal as the format of their research report. Ken Ling, as the former Red Guard was henceforth called, on the one hand contributed to the book as the author of all the raw material it based upon and for that was given credit by Ivan D. London in the preface to the original American publication. On the other hand, however, as the protagonist of the story "The Revenge of Heaven" reading from his journal and looking back on his Red Guard activities Ken Ling appears, of course, as the person studied by the American psychologist. He is certainly not the author of that study. The research report "The Revenge of Heaven" presented in the literary style of a novel was prepared by Miriam London with the assistance of the London's long-term collaborator Ta-Ling Lee.^[4]