Under Red Skies
Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China
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4.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A deeply personal and shocking look at how China is coming to terms with its conflicted past as it emerges into a modern, cutting-edge superpower.
Through the stories of three generations of women in her family, Karoline Kan, a former New York Times reporter based in Beijing, reveals how they navigated their way in a country beset by poverty and often-violent political unrest. As the Kans move from quiet villages to crowded towns and through the urban streets of Beijing in search of a better way of life, they are forced to confront the past and break the chains of tradition, especially those forced on women.
Raw and revealing, Karoline Kan offers gripping tales of her grandmother, who struggled to make a way for her family during the Great Famine; of her mother, who defied the One-Child Policy by giving birth to Karoline; of her cousin, a shoe factory worker scraping by on 6 yuan (88 cents) per hour; and of herself, as an ambitious millennial striving to find a job--and true love--during a time rife with bewildering social change.
Under Red Skies is an engaging eyewitness account and Karoline's quest to understand the rapidly evolving, shifting sands of China. It is the first English-language memoir from a Chinese millennial to be published in America, and a fascinating portrait of an otherwise-hidden world, written from the perspective of those who live there.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kan, a Chinese millennial and former New York Times reporter based in Beijing, offers an intimate look at the lives of three generations of her close-knit family, from her grandmother, who survived the Great Famine of 1959 1961, on to her principled mother, who sacrificed much to defy both her in-laws' wishes (by working as a teacher instead of helping with the family farm) and China's one-child policy (conceiving Kan, her second child, by secretly removing the government-required intrauterine device). This tale vividly illustrates the breadth of the changes China has undergone in recent decades abruptly switching from population-boosting initiatives in the 1960s to the one-child rule, and from prohibiting to allowing rural people to migrate to Beijing and how those changes have affected individual lives. While Kan shares her mother's independent spirit, researching the Tiananmen Square massacre and dating foreign men, the cultural forces she and her fellow millennials face are different. She describes many of them: the Chinese education system, the difficult lives of Chinese factory workers who produce goods for sale overseas, and the prejudice faced by rural workers in Beijing. Kan's candidness about Chinese culture and her experience, always mediated by affection for her country, makes this an invaluable resource to Western readers interested in Chinese life.
