Summary

Part 1: Silent Spring

In Chapter 1, The Madness Years, the veteran Red Guards of the Red Union assault the headquarters of the Red Guards of the April Twenty-Eighth Brigade in China in 1967 as part of the factional civil wars of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The April Twenty-Eighth brigade is new but determined to fight to the death, killing themselves if needed by way of explosives packed into the building’s iron stoves. A 15-year-old girl and member of the Brigade defiantly waves a flag from the rooftop, and is shot down. All across Beijing, the fighting rages as those considered “Monsters and Demons,” the enemies of the Communist Revolution, many of them intellectuals and academics. Among those intellectuals who have survived is Professor Ye Zhetai, a physicist at Tsinghua University, but he is now being tried before a mob of angry...