English

Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag

In April 1960 Chinese Communist authorities arrested Harry Wu. The son of a well-to-do Shanghai banker, he was cast into a Laogai prison labor camp. Though never formally charged or tried, he spent the next 19 years in a hellish netherworld of grueling labor, systematic starvation, and torture. Bitter Winds is the powerful story of Harry Wu’s imprisonment and survival, and of extraordinary acts of courage. In stunning detail, Wu recalls life in the Laogai—scavenging barren fields for frogs and snakes, and engaging in elaborate “food imagining” sessions in the barracks at night.