I'd love to know what happened in those years from a regular person's perspective or something.
I just read Gao's Battle for China's Past, and I wouldn't recommend it for what OP is asking for. Gao is more concerned with macro narratives told about the CR and who tells them, and he says very little about actual life during the time.
However, I also just read Dongping Han's The Unknown Cultural Revolution, and it has been incredibly enlightening. It gives a very close look at daily life for rural people in China at the time, the changes they went through, the gains they made, and contextualizes it all within the policies of the time.
I really highly recommend it. It really completely changed my perspective on things.
Have you found any good books on urban life during this period? I read a few chapters of Red Azalea in despair a while ago.
Unfortunately, not.
I think most narratives told about the CR are actually from urban people, but the narrative has been so focused on their victimization that it's hard to get an actual feel for what life was like for them.
Maybe just reading a historical accounts to the time might be helpful because it will likely focus on urban areas and the changes society was going through.
Chen Village may interest you. Very local and small-scale, but extensively covers local life of a village from shortly before the cultural revolution to mid 2000s. Most of it is during the cultural revolution, which provides some insight into how it was received / practiced in a relatively 'normal' rural peasant village, which is neat because usually the focus is on the urban side of things
Did you ever read Fangshen? It is a similar scale, told by a white USan journalist, and goes from 30s-50s. Would be neat to have read portraits of the major stages of change of rural life in China.
