Chinese Lessons

My sister and I, last week, went to Westfield to go shopping (obviously) and we walked into Borders because they had lots of sales (hehe)...and we browsed for like an hour literally cause there were so many books which were discounted to $2, $5 or $10 and my sister, who's now really interesting in China after going to Beijing a couple years back, picked up the book Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret just because it had the word Chinese in the title and it was only $2. So I, being bored with nothing to do, decided to read it because the blurb did sound interesting and it is seriously a really good book.

The book is a non-fiction book about John Pomfret's experiences in Nanjing, China when he went on exchange in the early 1980s and about other people's lives from when they were young to adulthood as they experienced the cultural revolution, communism under Mao to China being a 'capatilist' country.

Anyway, it's a really really good book and really good eye-opener of how people lived back then in China and I would seriously recommend you to read it. It also has some humour in it...

Here is the blurb:

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 illumination report from present-day China, and a moving portrait of its extraordinary people.