The Little Red Book Turns 50

When I first met my now-husband, Jindong Cai, in Shanghai in the late 1990s, there were many reasons he attracted me. He was handsome, charming, funny and kind. He was a talented orchestra conductor and great cook. But, being a perhaps typical laowai foreigner, one of the things that most impressed me was how, given the tiniest prompt, he could recite almost all of Quotations from Chairman Mao by memory.