Son of the Revolution opens in Changsha, a large city in central China, in 1957, as three-year-old Liang Heng is escaping from the child-care center where he’s been sent “for early training in Socialist thought” (4). As a child born into the People’s Republic of China, the Communist regime established by Chairman Mao in 1949, and as the son of cadres working for the Communist Party, Liang has the exclusive privilege of attending the child-care center—but he finds it a “hateful” place of rules and punishments (4). Young Liang runs away to his maternal grandmother Waipo’s house, but Waipo enlists the help of Liang’s paternal grandmother, Nai Nai, and the two cart him back to his “confinement” (6).

Liang has two older sisters: Liang Fang, born in 1949, and Liang Wei-ping, born in 1952. His father, Liang Shan, is a reporter, editor, and one of the founders of the Hunan Daily Communist Party newspaper, while his mother is a cadre in the Changsha Public Security Bureau. Both work so hard for the Party that “the family come[s] second” (4), so Liang has lived first with the stricter Nai Nai and then with “talkative and lively” Waipo, whom he prefers (5).