Chinese Lessons

"I found this book really unputdownable. We’ve all read lots of books about the reforms under Deng Xiaoping since 1979. Pomfret takes it straight down to street level, almost, with the story of five people that he knew, former classmates he had met at university as a foreign student in Nanjing in 1981. He was able to trace their lives intimately from when he left them. The book really has this grand sweep to it – like a great historical novel, part Balzac, part Exodus. The stories are very poignant and moving on their own, but once they’re displayed on the widescreen of China and the policy changes taking place in China at that time, it amplifies them even more. The detail is just amazing. There’s one guy who becomes an official in Nanjing. He becomes your typical petty official, banging his desk and demanding sentences be handed out to various criminals, and coming up with grand schemes to redo the city. Another guy goes into business. He has lots of failed businesses, but at one stage he manages to corner the market in urine in a district in Beijing. They distil urine to make a particular sort of medicinal product. So Pomfret’s old classmate goes around Beijing at night collecting people’s piss. And there’s a horrible story, about a guy whose parents were killed by some fellow students in the Cultural Revolution – and he has to bicycle past them every day. He’s resigned to the fact. He doesn’t boil with anger; he just shrugs his shoulders as if it was a bad thunderstorm that had passed or something. The stories themselves are incredibly poignant, even though they’re ordinary stories. In China, ordinary people’s lives have been so dramatic. It works really well, and the book is really well written as well."