Amazing book about China in the 1980s from an American, John Pomfret, who went to college there as part of the first foreign class allowed in the country. He traces the lives of eight of his classmates, exposing what life was really like in Mao's China. Not pretty. Everything you've heard about corrupt Communist party bosses and grinding poverty and public shaming and friends ratting out friends ratting out family members, and once-respected elders being crippled by hysterical rabble and the total gutting of the agricultural system and the countless unpredictable reverses of official philosophy so nobody ever knew exactly whom they were supposed to denounce or praise -- it all seems to be true.
I'd heard of all of these things, but they remained mostly abstract for me. It was hard for me to imagine a world as cruelly absurd as China of the 1960s and '70s, but Pomfret breathes life into it with the specifics of his friends's stories. Many are from the country, where showing the intellect one would need to get into college was precisely the kind of thing that could get you denounced. Saving books to read pegged you as a corrupt intellectual. And these labels had real repercussions, on how much food you got, what kind of jobs you could do, when you could leave your village or see your family or really do anything at all. There's lots more, but the book's across the room and I'm too lazy to get up and get it.
A really valuable work, utterly fascinating and highly readable.
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