China Witness
Voices from a Silent Generation
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
China Witness is the personal testimony of a generation whose stories have not yet been told. Here the grandparents and great-grandparents of today sum up in their own words - for the first and perhaps the last time - the vast changes that have overtaken China's people over a century. The book is at once a journey by the author through time and place, and a memorial to those who have lived through war and civil war, persecution, invasion, revolution, famine, modernization, Westernization - and have survived into the 21st century. We meet everyday heroes, now in their seventies, eighties and nineties, from across this vast country - a herb woman at a market, retired teachers, a legendary 'double-gun woman', Red Guards, oil pioneers, an acrobat, a female general, a lantern maker, taxi drivers, and more- those whose voices, as Xinran says, 'will help our future understand our past'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beijing-born, London-based writer Xinran, traveling across the expanse of the Chinese Republic over the years, sought out those who had witnessed the rise of communism more than half a century ago. The result is this stirring, startlingly honest account of life under Chairman Mao and the current reformers revamping the socialist state. If the reader wants proof of how resilient and tough the Chinese people are, witness the incredible stories related by Lin Xiangbei, a loyal Communist later branded a counterrevolutionary, or Teacher Sun and her husband, former political prisoners, or Mr. Changzheng, a survivor of the infamous Long March. Xinran (The Good Women of China) does not leave out the average people who were the backbone of the republic, such as an acrobat, an oil explorer, a tea-house news singer, all of whom reveal a rich, multifaceted national history that celebrated individualism as well as collective achievement. Along with a series of love letters from comrades on the political front, the author puts a bow on these candid interviews with a final set of astute observations in an especially noteworthy book. Illus., maps.
