Looking for Tank Man
A Novel
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year
A Harvard student from China discovers the fraught, hidden history of the Tiananmen Square massacre in this powerful novel of protest and suppression from the National Book Award–winning author.
When the Chinese premier visits Harvard, international student Pei Lulu encounters a lone protester, who will drastically change her understanding of the People's Republic and her own place in the world. For the first time, Lulu learns of the 1989 protest movement and the government’s violent response. Determined to find out more, she seeks answers from her family, who share surprising stories of their involvement, and from a formative university course based on powerful firsthand accounts.
At once a compelling coming-of-age tale and a poignant tribute to the courage of activists, Looking for Tank Man keeps this tragedy alive in the public memory and warns against the dangers of authoritarian regimes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the clunky latest from Jin (The Banished Immortal), a Chinese Harvard student grows fixated on the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Having never learned of the atrocity as a girl in China, Pei Lulu is shocked to hear of it from a protester on campus in 2008, during a demonstration against the Chinese premier's visit. Galvanized, Lulu signs up for a seminar on the 1989 democracy movement with a Canadian Chinese professor, who encourages her to pursue graduate work in history, despite her mom's insistence that she move back to Beijing and marry. On summer trips back to China as an undergraduate and later while pursuing her PhD at Columbia, she learns her mother and father were both involved in the demonstration and is brought in for questioning by the police after she asks others about the events. Unruffled, she continues researching "Tank Man," the unidentified protestor who briefly stood down the advancing army, as a means to better understanding her past. Jin juxtaposes pedantic summaries of the historical events with awkward episodes devoted to Lulu's personal life, such as her attempts to navigate unwanted advances from her adviser and a burgeoning love affair with a fellow student. There are pieces of a great novel here, but they don't hang together.
