Escaping The Nightmare

This powerful memoir is the compelling true story of Peter Tang, a Chinese labor camp survivor who was brutally imprisoned for 15 years. From the age of 26 to 41, Tang suffered in a labor camp and experienced denunciation, terror, and physical labor so intense that many of his fellow inmates sought escape through suicide. These were clearly places where life was worse than death.

The scale, number, and duration of the Chinese labor camps place them firmly among the greatest humanitarian atrocities of the twentieth century, along with those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And they are the only camps that have continued into the twenty-first century.

A graduate of the Shanghai Jiaotong University, young Peter Tang was nevertheless assigned to work in an army unit. When he tried to transfer to a suitable job or resign, he was refused. He was also denied permission to marry his girlfriend who had relatives overseas. Tang learned too late that he had unwittingly been branded a malcontent in the eyes of his army leaders, and had become an easy target to purge. 

After a former classmate tried to flee to Hong Kong, Tang was locked up, interrogated, and accused of being a member of a counterrevolutionary clique despite having no knowledge of or involvement in his classmate's escape attempt. He was assigned to two years of so-called "re-education through labor" as punishment. He never dreamed those two years would turn into fifteen long years of suffering. This is his memoir of that grueling labor camp experience.