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The "18 mansions" of the title refer to the buildings in a secret compound in Beijing where the Chinese Communist Party in the 1960s and 1970s housed delegations of communist parties all over the world to facilitate its clandestine aid to their insurgencies.


Mansion No. 7 housed the living quarters and offices in Beijing of the delegation from the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founded and led by Jose Ma. Sison, aka Amado Guerrero.


Miclat was a member of the CPP delegation who, with his family, lived and worked in that mansion starting in 1971. He returned to the Philippines in 1986, totally disillusioned with the party, which he says was a monster he "helped create, yet which devoured" him. He has since become an academic with a PhD and is at present dean of the Asian Center at the University of the Philippines.


Miclat's is not a fictional novel, but a personal and political memoir of his nearly two decades as one of Sison's earliest recruits, even living for two years in the leader's "underground" house as his editor and translator, and then as a cadre in the party cell in Beijing. Many of the persons in the book are identified by their real names, others are thinly veiled, while a few are named only by their aliases, probably in order for Miclat to write more freely or to spare these persons from embarrassment.


For instance, "Herz" was one of Sison's key operatives, who supervised the party's youth organizations in the crucial years of the early 1970s, the era of student power that led thousands of idealistic teenagers to communism, wrecked lives and, for many, death in some lopsided firefight.

Secrets of the 18 Mansions: Controversies & Political Intrigue