How the Survivors were Affected
After the revolution, about 612 Million survivors still remained in China. Many of them were deeply affected by the event, such as Min Zhou. A young girl during the revolution, she saw hers parents taken by the government and forced into a concentration camp. The government justified this by saying they were "sent to labor camps for 're-education'"(Robin Heffer). Zhou recalls her experience for Robin Heffer in an interview for the UCLA Newsroom. After her parents were taken, she was left as the "10-year-old head of her household, in charge of a 9-year-old brother and a 5-year-old sister". She worked out basic maths on an Abacus, and learned a valuable skill that would help her later in her life: learning English. She did this through listening to old records on her family's phonograph. Zhou moved on, graduating High School and passing as one of 5.7 millions applicants to Sun Yat-sen University, where she got a Bachelors Degree in English. She, alongside 270,000 others, left China in 1984 to pursue higher dreams in education. Min Zhou is now a Sociology professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. She is well-known in her field for her interesting study of San Francisco's Chinatown, and it's varying ethnicities. She is one of many stories of survivors of the genocide, leading a proper, fulfilling life.
Zhou, in her current job as a professor of sociology at UCLA