Chinese Lessons
John Pomfret
“A highly personal, honest, funny and well-informed account of China’s hyperactive effort to forget its past and reinvent its future.”
(The New York Times Book Review)'At a time when so many books about China are written from a distance — their authors having spent only a short time in the country, if any time at all — thank goodness for Chinese Lessons.'
(Wall Street Journal)'A moving account of individual experiences, indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the precarious national psyche of the world's most populous nation.'
(Kirkus Review)As one of the first American students admitted to China after the communist revolution, John Pomfret was exposed to a country still emerging from the twin tragedies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Crammed into a dorm room with seven Chinese men, Pomfret contended with all manner of cultural differences, from too-short beds and roommates intent on glimpsing a white man naked, to the need for cloak-and-dagger efforts to conceal his relationships with Chinese women. Amidst all this, he immersed himself in the remarkable lives of his classmates.
Beginning with Pomfret’s first day in China, Chinese Lessons takes us down the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University history class of 1982: Old Wu’s father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; Book Idiot Zhou labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; and Little Guan was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father.
As Pomfret follows his classmates from childhood to adulthood, he examines the effect of China’s transition from near-feudal communism to first-world capitalism. The result is an illuminating report from present-day China, and a moving portrait of its extraordinary people.
'Chinese Lessons is a rich, first-hand account of modern Chinese history as it was lived and experienced by five of the author's 1981 classmates at Nanjing University ... In his hands, the journey of his classmates becomes not just an entertaining and precisely rendered account of a changing China in which consumers' aspirations ratcheted up from bicycles and wrist watches to Audis and flip-phones; it also becomes a splendid human narrative of how fragile souls weather barbaric cruelty, social shifts and the rewiring of a nation.'
Karl Taro Greenfeld (Washington Post)'Pomfret's stories are riveting in their colour and detail ... your empathy centre would have to be cauterised not to respond to Chinese Lessons.'
Rowan Callick (Australian Literary Review)'This remarkable book ... is both beautifully written and compulsively readable. This is a very human story of a country in change and the way that change affects ordinary people. The stories he tells are both painful and illuminating. Few books have captured modern China so vividly and produced such a rich image of a complex country.'
(Sydney Morning Herald)John Pomfret
Formerly The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Beijing and Los Angeles, John Pomfret was named editor of the Post’s Outlook Section in 2007. In 2003, he was awarded the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism and in 2007 won the Shorenstein Prize for coverage of Asia. He lives near Washington, D.C., with his wife and family.
Website: http://www.johnpomfret.net/
Extent: 336pp
Size: 234mm x 153mm
ISBN (13): 9781921215759
RRP: $35.00
Pub date: September 2007
Status: Out of print
ANZ, South Africa
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