STILL CLOUDY:

Readers who grew up in Hong Kong will feel a pang of nostalgia as he describes, with wide-eyed wonder, life in the then-British colony: the sight of great trading ships in the harbour, the sounds of the foreign tongue called English, the taste of hot chocolate and buttered rolls.

But the boy, stricken with homesickness and brain­washing, threatens to kill himself if he is not allowed to return. "I belonged in communist China, not dirty capitalist Hong Kong," he thinks at the time. So, in a decision that would turn out to be disastrous, he goes back over the border to the mainland just as the (1958-1962) was starting.

His life becomes a series of nightmares that leave him traumatised. The night after he returns, he witnesses his first execution. "I shook and gasped, and frantically looked for bullet holes on my body; I had to stop the bleeding," he remembers. He watches as his father is arrested by a pimply-faced, obscenity-spewing Red Guard who storms into the family home.

Kwong learns to be suspicious of everyone and to censor his writing. One wrong word in a letter to his father, sen­tenced to 15 years of labour in Heilongjiang province, could get the family in more trouble. At the same time, the boy yearns for the trappings other children have, like the red scarves that would identify him as a true and loyal Chinese.

There are rays of sunlight in this otherwise dark narrative, such as when Kwong remembers flying kites, playing with his friends and watching ducks. He rejoices when his grandmother makes the rare trip to see him, bringing imported luxuries like Spam, condensed milk, arrowroot biscuits and bricks of brown sugar.

By the 60s, however, "famine had well and truly set in". Kwong documents the physical horrors of starvation that he saw as a child: faces turned yellow, bellies swollen with gas, legs shrunk into sticks and oozing liquid.

"In the dark, people tripped over bodies and let out screams," he writes of the corpses left in the streets. "We all kept our eyes wide open as we walked holding hands." All anyone could think or dream about was making money and buying food.

Even the book's rather poetic-sounding title has a cynical meaning. It comes from a quote from Kwong's mother: "A bright moon will shine again one day, after the clouds disperse." But she says these words just as she's bribing a government official with cigarettes, in a desperate bid to find favour for her family.

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