When I graduated from high school, China was under a reign of terror. The notorious Cultural Revolution was in full swing, a so-called revolution which Mao Zedong had started to get rid of anyone suspected of disloyalty to him and which the Chinese government later denounced as a catastrophe.

    Schools and colleges were closed. Millions of homes were ransacked by the Red Guards. Vast numbers of innocent people were interrogated, imprisoned, tortured or killed. Unable to endure these horrors, many committed suicide.

    I had originally imagined Mao to be a great leader. But the illusions vanished  when I saw my eighty-year-old grandfather forced to attend "confession sessions" on shiveringly cold evenings; when one of my favorite writers was driven to drinking poison; when I saw my teacher, with whom I had been swimming just a few days before, lying in a pool of blood after flinging himself from the sixth floor of our school building. He simply could not bear the physical and psychological cruelty of his interrogators.

    I found myself living in an alien and hostile environment in which almost everything was turned upside down. My first instinct was to protect myself and survive.

    Mao Zedong soon claimed that all the education the young people had received in the past was bourgeois and students needed to be re-educated through hard labor. He decreed that all high school graduates go to the countryside to work as farmhand. I was fully aware what kind of life would be in store for me if re-education was to be my lot. I would be tilling the field from dawn to dusk with primitive tools, carrying loads of manure on my shoulder, living in crowded dormitories without running water and electricity, and having to attend, after a hard day in the field, endless indoctrination sessions on Maoism. I would work without pay except for a meager ration of rice. It would be worse than unemployment. But, worst of all, I would be deprived of my books. 

   The local authorities first exerted pressure on my parents as both of them were teachers, teachers being the most vulnerable target of Mao's "cultural revolution." My parents told them that although they supported me to go to the countryside, the decision had to be my own since I was already seventeen years old.

    The heat was then turned on me. A team of three party functionaries was dispatched to my home.

    They would call on me, at intervals of four or five days, and each time spend two or three hours haranguing me with lectures and urging me to follow Mao's dictate. As a rule, I would politely ask them to sit down and treat them each with a cup of tea. Then I would maintain my silence throughout. I was never provocative, though.

    I knew they could not physically move me to the countryside. As long as I was not provocative, it would be difficult for them to find fault with me and thus have an excuse to force me to obey. Their visits invariably met with my passive defiance but I was meticulously polite at the same time. This ritual was repeated for more than a month.

    Finally their patience gave way. In a matter-of-fact tone, the head of the team explained to me that they realized they had failed in their task, and that they needed something to report back to their superior.

    For the first time I took him seriously. I asked him what it was that he needed.

    "A doctor's statement," he said, "to the effect that you are not fit for farm labor."

    "What health conditions would be considered acceptable?" I was interested.

    "Heart trouble, high blood pressure, and kidney problems are the most common examples," was the reply.

    At that point I made him promise never to bother me again if I gave him what he wanted.

    Three days later, I gave him a signed statement from the local hospital certifying that I had high blood pressure. After that he kept his word and left me alone.

    With that nuisance off my back, I began my self-education regime. Besides English, mathematics and the sciences, I studied Confucius' Analects and other Chinese classics under the knowing eye of my grandfather, a classical scholar. I read as many books as I could lay my hands on.

    In the dark absurdity and hysterical insanity of the Cultural Revolution, books became my best friends. The knowledge and wisdom I gained from them inspired me, above all else, with hope.

    My reading was extensive, ranging from The Book of Changes to Tao Te Ching, from Intrigues of the Warring States to The Records of the Historian, from Zhenguan Zhengyao  to The Comprehensive Mirror to Rulers, traversing the vast panoply of China's history.

    I made copies notes while I was reading. Years later, it was these notes that provided the germination for The Book of Chinese Wisdom.

   Working in corporate America, the practical value of the wisdom embedded in those classics often comes back to me as fresh and relevant as I first discovered it.