Changes in woman's life revolutionary

The Deseret Morning News today begins Voices, a series about Utah's diversity.

The book was, quite literally, a must-read, which is why Peng-Peng Tang and millions of other Chinese owned a copy of "Quotations from Chairman Mao" in 1966. Tang was 13 then, a middle-schooler in Hefei, in the Anhui Province. Like other students during the first year of The Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, Tang knew Communist leader Mao Zedong's quotations by heart.

"A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another," Mao wrote and Tang memorized. Eliminate "the four olds, " said Mao, "old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits." Old street names? Change them. "Bourgeois" clothing? Put on a pair of nondescript pants. The traditional operas? Better to listen to Mao's quotations set to music.

This was the running monologue of Tang's youth.

But now, on a Saturday evening nearly 40 years later, Tang stands on a stage at Highland High School, as a member of the Salt Lake Chinese Choir. She is wearing a red silk brocade dress and has long since changed her name from Peng-Peng to the more American-sounding Pam. The choir — the women in silk, the men in suits and ties — will sing three selections, none of them by Mao: "Pearl in the East," "Song of Laughter" and "My Heart Is Still Chinese."

"Wearing a Western suit, my heart is still a Chinese heart," says this last song. And that's how she feels too, says Tang. A Chinese heart, she says, puts family first and respects its elders. Even a woman who has lived in America for 24 years, as Tang has, might still feel more comfortable with Chinese food and Chinese friends. When she writes poems, and an occasional article for the local newspaper Eastern Trends, she writes in Chinese.

When the Cultural Revolution began in the autumn of 1966, spurred by Mao's zeal to bring ideological purity to the Chinese Communist Party, students stopped going to classes and instead studied the sayings of Mao. Those students who were pure enough were invited to join the Red Guard.

Macromedia Flash fileListen to Pam Tang — her story, her voiceRequires Macromedia Flash Player.

Tang remembers tagging along once when the Red Guard forced its way into homes in the neighborhood, gathering up any books deemed too old or too foreign, then burning them in the yard. "I worshipped him dearly," says Tang about Chairman Mao. "The way very decent Christians worship God."