Niu-Niu (NOO-Noo) was four years old when, amidst the rubble that had been her comfortable "bourgeois" home, she watched the beating of her helpless parents, and saw them, bloody and with shaven heads, taken away for what seemed like forever. That traumatic day marked the end of Niu-Niu's innocent childhood. Two days after she was born, on May 16, 1966, Mao Zedung began his "Great Cultural Revolution, " which caused untold suffering. For the next nine years, Niu-Niu's life became a nightmare in which human kindness and reason all but disappeared, where violence and hunger were the order of the day. This direct eyewitness account of one of the world's most shocking social upheavals is told vividly and compassionately. It is a chronicle readers will not forget.