How To Counter the Cultural Revolution: My family's full circle journey from madness in China to America
A time capsule letter I wrote 5 years ago about my family's history, which launched this Substack and drew parallels between the US Woke Revolution and Chinese Cultural Revolution
Comrades: We are countering the American Cultural Revolution.
Today, I’d like to share a letter I wrote to a small group of family and friends five years ago. I sent it after my grandparents passed away, right as the COVID mass formation psychosis was starting. Writing helped crystallize many ideas and memes that had been floating around in my head and iPhone photos. I launched this Substack two years after the letter, which became one of the earliest posts. It is one of the longest, most wholesome, and least spicy essays I’ve written. Yet some of the original recipients of this letter no longer talk to me.
Several of my posts have drawn parallels between the US woke revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I made a series of videos depicting modern struggle sessions based on the opening scene of The Three-Body Problem. How To Live the Dream was an interview with my father, who escaped the CCP. How To Groom Commissars described my experience participating in a Demoralized DIEvy League struggle session. In How To Control your Soul’s Desire for Freedom, I interviewed with an uncle who suffered under CCP oppression. Never forget that human rights NGOs remained silent about all tyrannical mandates and lockdowns during COVID hysteria.
Over the past few years, you may have noticed more prominent figures discussing how the woke revolution reminds them of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, and even Bill Maher. Did it spawn from this samizdat? I don’t know is who my secret readers are and what they do with this content. This chapter in history should be taught in all schools. I’m glad these ideas have spread and the pendulum appears to be swinging back to sanity. Let’s continue to turn the tide together.
February 2020
Hope your 2020s are off to a great start. As we enter a new decade and phases of our lives, I wanted to share a personal history, reflection, and vision. During the past month, I lost my grandparents, a legend passed suddenly before his time, and a strange new disease is spreading. We don’t take enough time to tell our favorite people how much we care, so I want to start by saying that I treasure and love all of you. I am blessed to have such a fantastic group of family and friends. In a world full of distraction, artificiality, and transience, relationships of candor, sincerity, and permanence are precious. Whether it’s discussing a passion project in person, shooting the shit over a call, or best of all a spicy meme text, I appreciate everything that we do for each other. If you are reading this, that means I would run through brick walls for you and know that you’d do the same for me.
In commemoration of my grandparents, my parents shared many stories about our family’s history that I hadn’t known or fully appreciated before. My grandparents and their generation endured the horrors of World War II, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. While fleeing from college as the battlefront approached, my grandfather almost died of tuberculosis that hampered him for the rest of his life. One of his brothers was captured, tortured, and hanged for dissent, while another was a pilot who disappeared after being shot down. Hundreds of millions went through unimaginable suffering, tens of millions died, and all submitted to fear and scarcity. My grandparents moved to the US to help raise me. They were originally planning to return to their homeland, but after the brutal events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 they were too terrified to ever go back. They chose to work at McDonald’s as free people here instead of working as scientists, but always looking over their shoulders over there. Until their last days, they remained scared to express their opinions…