Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, by Kang Zhengguo. W.W. Norton & Co, 2007, 443 pp., $27.95 (cloth)

For Kang Zhengguo it all started when he began keeping a diary. In Maoist China, with no place for privacy, even an innocent record of daily life could be an incriminating document.

Zhengguo's minor transgression was enough to set in motion a series of accusations that would quickly establish him as a reactionary member of the land-owning classes. We follow the author's ordeals in these "confessions" as he is marched off from college to a brick factory, labor camp, prison, rural exile and, finally, overseas exile.

Zhengguo's description of his collision with the new forces driving into mayhem is all the more forceful for having experienced aspects of a more civilized China in the form of his grandfather's scholar garden, the ancient walls of his birthplace, Xian, and a home library of literary classics like "Journey to the West" and "The Water Margin." These classics were augmented with titles obtained in those used bookstores that were still allowed to operate. With schools becoming more like correctional institutions, Zhengguo devised his own study curriculum, a small library of books he would have to conceal for the time when there would be no books.