To the Storm : THE ODYSSEY OF A REVOLUTIONARY CHINESE WOMAN recounted by Yue Daiyun and written by Carolyn Wakeman (University of California: $17.95; 405 pp.)

Was Mao’s China totalitarian? Simon Leys recently revived that question, polemically, in “The Burning Forest.” A more oblique but very immediate, perhaps partly unconscious, look at personality and free will in China is afforded in Yue Daiyun’s autobiography, “To the Storm.”

The plot may sound familiar: how Yue adapted to a society that couldn’t decide whether “her kind,” free-thinking intellectuals, were national assets or enemies. This important personal history, though, is told with such sang-froid as to re-create an authentic mystery: How free was Yue Daiyun to direct her own life? For Yue was a leader in her society, even after being expelled from the Communist Party in 1958 and given a short term at hard labor.

“To the Storm,” which reads better than many novels, and was composed by Carolyn Wakeman, an American sensitive both to China and to the English language. To that extent, it resembles ex-Red Guard Liang Heng’s blockbuster autobiography, “Son of the Revolution.” But Yue, born in 1931, is a generation older than Liang. She’s seen less of China’s underside, but more of the traditional family. And she has a novelist’s memory, sufficient for Wakeman to have reconstructed an intimate diary of Yue’s emotions and free associations. As much zibai (self-accounting) as autobiography, this book slights such standard topics as childhood (Yue disliked her father and grew up amid warfare--as did many mid-century Chinese children), but recounts the miserable “final outcomes” of Yue’s every acquaintance.

Yue Daiyun risks much with her candor. She explains the state’s secret dossiers on people: the privileges of the set whose nursery schoolers got to perform for Zhou Enlai--her set; and at least some of her husband’s involvement with the dread Gang of Four. Yue exposes how she, a branch secretary for the Party, fingered five people as possible rightists months before she was purged under that very label. Five was her quota: “I spent many hours that summer poring over the records of the rectification meetings held the previous spring, trying to decide who among the department’s teachers should now be construed as enemies of the Party. We had been provided with examples, with the profiles of ‘standard persons,’ and we assiduously compared the cases of likely suspects with those prototypes. . . . The first, a teacher in his early 50s, was not difficult to select, because his complicated past had already triggered the Party’s suspicions. . . . I had taken careful notes of (his) remarks. . . . Later our branch committee read the transcript from a different perspective, singling out incriminating sentences and arranging them in a new way. This is how guilt was established at that time.”

Herself condemned, Yue Daiyun details the public and private reasons why people ostracized those the Party wanted ostracized, and how they forgave themselves afterwards. Did palpable fear underlie obedience? There the mystery begins. In 1951, Yue felt compassion for a landlord sentenced to die. He was innocent. “But there was no way to save him.”

Yue Daiyun, however, was a true believer. Still, in 1969, after a decade of being treated like an ex-convict, she rationalized that surgical excision of cancer entailed removal of “some healthy tissue” (like her). Her faith did not waver until 1971 when Mao’s comrade-in-arms Lin Biao was vilified as having plotted Mao’s death.

Even now, she feels that “not a single step was taken in vain.” How can that be? The statement suggests a moral and perceptual gulf between traditional East and traditional West. The cadre, like the “Confucian” (Leys’ moral exemplar), is not created by being cast into hell, or by being humbled into acknowledgment of kinship with all sinners. The cadre is, on the contrary, “tempered,” “steeled.” By her passage through the flames, Yue Daiyun poses a major question of our times: Would she--would others like her--do it over?