Kang serves as an extraordinary guide through an extraordinary period of Chinese history. He lives through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the thaw following Mao's death, the growing democracy movement of the 1980s and the crackdown after the protests in Tiananmen Square.
The great events are expressed in personal terms, and they are colored by Kang's unusual sensibility. He suffers, but he sees himself more often than not as a comic figure and the repressive machinery of the Chinese state as a tangle of absurdities.
His tone is sardonic, wry, urbane. He relishes the particulars of his often horrific circumstances, the details of rural life and, above all, the strange contradictions of his society. Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, small social spaces opened up, allowing people to breathe. An act of kindness here, a sneaky bit of deception there, and the inevitable inefficiencies and human weaknesses of those in charge contribute to an unusually complex picture of life in China in its most repressive period.
Simply as a documentary record of daily life in China, Confessions is a rewarding read, but Kang, a gifted stylist (well served by his translator, Susan Wilf), has transmuted his struggles into a literary work of high distinction.
And it has a happy ending too. In the 1970s Kang returned to school, found a job as a university teacher and, after his work on classical Chinese poetry reached an academic audience in the US was invited to teach Chinese at Yale.
Needless to say, Kang, even after landing on his feet in the US, bringing his wife and children with him, manages to trip up one more time. Although he is well into middle age, and the new China is swept up in a quasi-capitalist economic boom, the party is not quite finished with him, and old habits die hard, as he discovers on a last trip home.
There is always time, apparently, for one more confession.
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