'Colours of the Mountain' author Da Chen dies at 57

Da Chen, the brilliant storyteller who drew from the hardships he suffered as a persecuted child growing up in the midst of China's cultural revolution to create the critically acclaimed memoir "Colours of the Mountain", has died at age 57.

Chen died of lung cancer on December 17, his wife, Dr Sun-Ling Chen, told The Associated Press on Tuesday from the family's home in Temecula, California.

His most recent book, "Girl Under a Red Moon", was published just three months ago.

Chen's breakthrough came in 1999 with the critically acclaimed, best-selling "Colours of the Mountain", in which he recounted the abuses he and his family suffered during the latter years of the country's Cultural Revolution.

It was a time when the Communist Party and its leader, Mao Zedong, were cementing their grip on power following the country's 1949 revolution and Chen's family, who had been prosperous landowners, became pariahs, as did many others.

Chen was bullied in school and eventually kicked out to work in farm fields as a pre-teen while his father and grandfather, college-educated intellectuals, were tortured and sent to reeducation camps.

"He watched his father being hung up by his thumbs and beaten and his grandfather stoned frequently with rocks thrown at him by children," Chen's wife said.

"He would undergo a lot of humiliation parades where they would throw fruit and other things at him. Frequently he was sent to labour camps where he worked with people twice his age digging irrigation trenches in the mountains."
"Despite the devastating circumstances of his childhood and adolescence, Chen recounts his coming of age with arresting simplicity," Publishers Weekly said of the book. "Readers will cry along with this sad, funny boy who proves tough enough to make it, every step of the painful way."