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Asia- China Peoples Republic 1949 to Present |
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Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China
by John Pomfret
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Synopses & Reviews A first-hand account of the remarkable transformation of China over the past forty years as seen through the life of an award-winning journalist and his four Chinese classmates.
As a twenty-year-old exchange student from Stanford University, John Pomfret spent a year at Nanjing University in China. His fellow classmates were among those who survived the twin tragedies of Mao's rule — the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution — and whose success in government and private industry today are shaping China's future. Pomfret went on to a career in journalism, spending the bulk of his time in China. After attending the twentieth reunion of his class, he decided to reacquaint himself with some of his classmates. Chinese Lessons is their story and his own.
Beginning with Pomfret's first days in China, Chinese Lessons takes us back to the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. One classmate's father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; another classmate labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; a third was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father. As we watch Pomfret and his classmates begin to make their lives as adults, we see as never before the human cost and triumph of China's transition from near-feudal communism to first-world capitalism. Review: "Pomfret's first sojourn in China came as an American exchange student at Nanjing University in 1981, near the outset of China's limited reopening to the West and its halting, chaotic and momentous conversion from Maoist totalitarianism to police state capitalism and status as world economic giant. Over the next two decades, he returned twice as a professional journalist and was an eyewitness to the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Pomfret's enthusiasm and personal access make this an engaging examination of three tumultuous decades, rooted in the stories of classmates whose remarkable grit and harrowing experiences neatly epitomize the sexual and cultural transformations, and the economic ups and downs, of China since the 1960s. At the same time, Pomfret draws on intimate conversations and personal diaries to paint idiosyncratic portraits with a vivid, literary flair. Viewing China's version of capitalism as an anomoly, and focused overwhelmingly within its national borders, the book's lack of a greater critical context will be limiting for some. But Pomfret's palpable and pithy first-hand depiction of the New China offers a swift, elucidating introduction to its awesome energies and troubling contradictions." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "Those of us reporting on China a few years ago believed the big story of the early 21st century would be its transformation from impoverished pariah to economic juggernaut and global superpower. Instead, 9/11 shifted the attention of U.S. media to the Muslim world, and China became, as it had been for most of the previous 500 years, an intricate sideshow. That's a shame, because the massive societal ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) shifts in China — which form the most fascinating, relevant and important development of the new millennium — have been steadily pushed off the front pages and opening segments by a flood of stories on the war on terror. Washington Post reporter John Pomfret's compulsively readable new book on today's China deserves far more attention than that. 'Chinese Lessons' is a rich, firsthand account of modern Chinese history as it was lived and experienced by five of the author's 1981 classmates at Nanjing University. Pomfret was among the first generation of American college students to enroll in exchange programs with Chinese universities in the early 1980s; the New York native grew up to become The Washington Post's Beijing bureau chief and one of the very best reporters covering China throughout the dynamic 1990s, with his writings emerging as the standard by which many of his peers judged their own work. 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. When Pomfret arrived in China shortly after Deng Xiaoping had launched China's free-market-oriented economic reforms, he met his college roommates — seven perpetually hungry, reed-thin, cotton-jacketed survivors of various denouncements, rustications and 'struggle sessions' inflicted on supposed traitors. They generously gave him the bunk next to the window, a prime location in a dank, first-floor dormitory room that was a maze of wet clothes hanging to dry amid a haze of garlic stench. The students whom Pomfret came to know were only just emerging from a long Maoist nightmare: 'My classmates snooped on each other, read each other's diaries, feared and suspected one another — an expression of the deep mistrust they perfected during the Cultural Revolution when they were pitted against their parents, siblings, and friends.' Every Chinese over the age of, say, 45, has a vivid recollection of life under Mao Zedong — often of the national psychotic episode known as the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao unleashed his Red Guards as he re-established control in the mid-1960s. Pomfret vividly recounts such stories from his classmates and their families. There is Old Wu (called 'old' because he is a year older than Pomfret), the son of a prominent academic, who found out about the murder of his parents from two fellow Red Guards as they giddily recounted it. Or there's Zhou Lianchun, who, as a 15-year-old Red Guard, fanatically denounced his mother in public for three days as a 'capitalist' and screamed at her to renounce her 'bourgeois sensibility.' The journey of these college roommates through university and into middle age is an easy-to-follow road map through post-Mao China. 'Chinese Lessons' explains so many of the contradictions that one encounters in the country today: A nation that prides itself on family bonds and ancestor worship can also exploit relatives and tear down monuments. Pomfret shows how the cutthroat immorality that pervades so many segments of Chinese society today is rooted in the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. ('Why,' he wonders, 'did so many stories in China always seem to end with the bad guys getting away, literally, with murder?') Yet once Deng lifted the economic strictures of communism, as immoral as they were, they were never replaced by another ethical code save the 'man-eat-man' (the common Chinese translation of 'dog-eat-dog') capitalism of modern China. As a result, China has gone from being one of the most egalitarian societies in the world to among the least. It is a rapidly aging country stricken by widespread and devastating environmental degradation, and the government's first response to epidemics, poisoned water supplies and natural disasters is usually to try to cover up the debacle. Pomfret's sketches of self-serving Chinese officials, bureaucrats and businesspeople will be depressingly familiar to anyone who has worked in China. (Though this was the first time I had read of some Chinese executives' penchant for spending weekends smoking methamphetamine, popping Viagra and bedding prostitutes.) And Pomfret's portraits of contemporary Chinese who enter adulthood with a naive optimism that is soon replaced by heartbreaking cynicism will be maddening to readers who are rooting for China to become a responsible world power. Yet to his great credit, Pomfret's affection for the people he is writing about almost always shows through, which keeps 'Chinese Lessons' from feeling like a polemic; the book's accumulation of acutely observed detail is compelling. Pomfret ends by positing a notion that will be increasingly discussed in years to come as China's great opportunity for economic growth begins to look more and more like a wasted chance to improve the lives of so many of its people: 'The social contract hashed out by Deng — you can get rich if you keep your mouth shut — is fraying because too few people have won their share of the bargain.' If Pomfret is correct (and I think he is), China will still be the great story of the 21st century — not because of what has gone right but because of what has gone wrong. Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of 'China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century's First Great Epidemic' and was the editor of Time Asia from 2001 to 2004. He is now the editor at large at Sports Illustrated." Reviewed by Karl Taro Greenfeld, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "[Pomfret] loves China, and he excels at describing the minutiae that make up Chinese life....He makes an engaging, expert guide to the changes that have transformed China in the last quarter-century." New York Times Review: "A moving account of individual experiences, indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the precarious national psyche of the world's most populous nation." Kirkus Reviews Synopsis: “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 As one 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 that, 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. About the Author John Pomfret is a reporter for The Washington Post. Formerly the Post's Beijing bureau chief, he is now the Los Angeles bureau chief. In 2003, Pomfret was awarded the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism by the Asia Society, an annual award for best coverage of Asia. He lives with his wife and family in Los Angeles.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780805076158
- Subtitle:
- Five Classmates and the Story of the New China
- Author:
- Pomfret, John
- Publisher:
- Henry Holt and Co.
- Subject:
- History
- Subject:
- China
- Subject:
- Asia - China
- Subject:
- Foreign correspondents
- Publication Date:
- 20060808
- Binding:
- HC
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 336
- Dimensions:
- 9.52x6.40x1.12 in. 1.41 lbs.
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