teacher gui | nixon’s letter & good kids gone bad ::
Sunday, December 28th, 2008:: in this video short, 93 year old Teacher Gui (Ms. Gui Biqing, 桂碧清) tells two short stories from the Cultural Revolution era in China; one about a son taking the punishment for his family’s capitalist ventures and bourgeoisie background while they were abroad, and another about the good children of academics / intellectuals going bad and rebelling against their parents and society.
This video is also available on Tudou for faster loading in China.
The “teacher gui” video series will be sharing short excerpts from ongoing interviews with Teacher Gui, who is working with Chen Yi (陈怡), a reporter at the Shanghai Service Platform for Science & Public (上海科普资源开发与共享平台), to write her memoirs; a yet-to-be titled autobiography published sometime in 2009.
Teacher Gui has been a resident of Shanghai since she was a teenager. Born in 1917, she spent her early years growing up in Beijing on the campus of Qinghua University where her father was a professor. When the Japanese came too close for comfort, Teacher Gui and her family fled south to Shanghai, where shortly thereafter they were again inconvenienced by the Japanese.
Teacher Gui has lived through some of modern China’s most turbulent and interesting times. Through it all, including an 18 month stint locked up during the cultural revolution for being accused of espionage, she’s never stopped working. She was a radio news broadcaster with the Soviet Union broadcasting station in Shanghai, a kindergarten headmaster, and Chinese language teacher. She’s been teaching Mandarin to foreigners in Shanghai since the early 1940’s, and she still teaches to this day.
For more on Teacher Gui, feel free to Baidu or her; there are plenty of interesting articles, interviews, etc. from over the years.
// AjS
