| Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China |  | Author: John Pomfret
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
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Rating:  50 reviews
Sales Rank: 54,357
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 0805086641
Dewey Decimal Number: 951
EAN: 9780805086645
ASIN: 0805086641
Publication Date: July 24, 2007
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Product Description
A first-hand account of the remarkable transformation of China over the past forty years as seen through the life of an award-winning journalist and his four Chinese classmates
As a twenty-year-old exchange student from Stanford University, John Pomfret spent a year at Nanjing University in China. His fellow classmates were among those who survived the twin tragedies of Mao’s rule—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution—and whose success in government and private industry today are shaping China’s future. Pomfret went on to a career in journalism, spending the bulk of his time in China. After attending the twentieth reunion of his class, he decided to reacquaint himself with some of his classmates. Chinese Lessons is their story and his own.
Beginning with Pomfret’s first days in China, Chinese Lessons takes us back to the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. One classmate’s father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; another classmate labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; a third was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father. As we watch Pomfret and his classmates begin to make their lives as adults, we see as never before the human cost and triumph of China’s transition from near-feudal communism to first-world capitalism.
John Pomfret is a reporter for The Washington Post. Formerly the Post's Beijing bureau chief, he is now the Los Angeles bureau chief. In 2003, Pomfret was awarded the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism by the Asia Society, an annual award for best coverage of Asia. He lives with his wife and family in Los Angeles. As a twenty-two-year-old exchange student at Nanjing University in 1981, John Pomfret was one of the first American students to be admitted to China after the Communist Revolution of 1949. Living in a cramped dorm room, Pomfret was exposed to a country few outsiders had ever experienced, one fresh from the twin tragedies of Mao's rule—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Twenty years later, Pomfret returned to the university for a class reunion. Once again, he immersed himself in the lives of his classmates, especially the one woman and four men whose stories make up Chinese Lessons, an intimate and revealing portrait of the Chinese people. Beginning with Pomfret's first day in China, Chinese Lessons takes us back to the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. We learn that Old Wu's father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; Book Idiot Zhou labored in the fields for year rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; Little Guan was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father. In Chinese Lessons, Pomfret follows his classmates from childhood to university and on to adulthood to show the effect that the country's transition from near-feudal communism to First World capitalism has had on his generation. "[A] compulsively readable new book on today's China . . . Chinese Lessons is a rich, first-hand account of modern Chinese history as it was lived and experienced by five of the author's 1981 classmates at Nanjing University . . . Pomfret's affection for the people he is writing about almost always shows through, which keeps Chinese Lessons from feeling like a polemic; the book's accumulation of acutely observed detail is compelling."—Karl Taro Greenfeld, The Washington Post Book World " [A] compulsively readable new book on today's China . . . Chinese Lessons is a rich, first-hand account of modern Chinese history as it was lived and experienced by five of the author's 1981 classmates at Nanjing University . . . Pomfret's affection for the people he is writing about almost always shows through, which keeps Chinese Lessons from feeling like a polemic; the book's accumulation of acutely observed detail is compelling. Pomfret ends by positing a notion that will be increasingly discussed in years to come as China's great opportunity for economic growth begins to look more and more like a wasted chance to improve the lives of so many of its people: "The social contract hashed out by Deng—you can get rich if you keep your mouth shut—is fraying because too few people have won their share of the bargain." If Pomfret is correct (and I think he is), China will still be the great story of the 21st century—not because of what has gone right but because of what has gone wrong."—Karl Taro Greenfeld, The Washington Post Book World "[A] highly personal, honest, funny and well-informed account of China’s hyperactive effort to forget its past and reinvent its future. What makes this book particularly rewarding is that Pomfret not only describes China today, he also reminds us what came before, thereby posing the important question: Is it possible for China to avoid reckoning with its past and still become a responsible, possibly great, nation?"—Orville Schell, The New York Times Book Review "[Pomfret] loves China, and he excels at describing the minutiae that make up Chinese life: the slang, the food, the bathrooms and the explosion of nouveau-riche bad taste in the boom towns and shopping districts. He makes an engaging, expert guide to the changes that have transformed China in the last quarter-century"—William Grimes, The New York Times “Few Chinese admit they committed crimes during the Cultural Revolution. But forty years later Zhou confided in his American classmate John Pomfret, who had been a contemporary at Nanjing University in 1981 . . . Pomfret, the author of Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China, an eloquent and unexpected study of a society with something wrong at its core, went to study in China in 1980. Admitted in 1981 to one of the country’s leading universities, for two years he studied history and lived, crammed together with seven Chinese roommates, in a small room hung with manky washing.”—Jonathan Mirsky, The Times Literary Supplement "In this intimate and revealing book, John Pomfret shows why he is one of the great China correspondents of his generation: He has never held himself at a distance, but has plunged in, with vigor and an open mind. His approach to China has no tint of romanticism or awe; the lives he discovers and the stories he tells, including his own, are unvarnished, unexpected, and riveting."—Steve Coll, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars "Chinese Lessons is an extraordinary book. Through telling the intimate stories of his former classmates, John Pomfret reveals a contemporary China where many individual lives have been thwarted and twisted. This is a book full of insights, honesty, and compassion. It touched me deeply."—Ha Jin, author of Waiting "John Pomfret has written a brilliant, insightful book describing the dark side and human cost of the 'Chinese economic miracle.' His feel for China, based on years of living there, his fluency in Chinese, and his reporting genius cut through the sham and spin."—James R. Lilley, former U.S. Ambassador to China and chief of the American Mission in Taiwan "Washington Post reporter Pomfret looks back at his student days at Nanjing University in 1981 and the lives of his classmates, survivors of one of the most tumultuous periods in the country's history. Readers numbed by the catalogue of crimes offered in Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, will find them evoked here with more personal applications to the lives of Big Bluffer Ye, Book Idiot Zhou, Little Guan, Old Xu and Daybreak Song. Don't be misled by their jaunty college nicknames. These are the children of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, convulsive political purges unleashed by Mao. They witnessed (and sometimes were forced to act as accomplices to) the humiliation, torture and even deaths of their own parents. Pomfret sketches each of the five as he remembers them from college, including as well the story of his own student days in a country still ill at ease with foreigners. It's his detailed reporting about their lives before and after graduation, however, that sets this book apart. While knowing that he can't fully comprehend China's tortuous history or its complete effect on his subjects, the author has immersed himself as much as any outsider can in all things Chinese, enabling him to assess each of his subjects with remarkable empathy. He plainly admires these former classmates, but he's clear-eyed about the peculiar ways in which each has been twisted by a tyrannous political system that 30 years ago put 'capitalist roaders' to death and today declares that 'to be rich is glorious.' It's fascinating to see how each has negotiated adulthood—love, family, work—in a country hurtling toward modernity under the Party's capricious whip hand. A moving account of individual experiences, indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the precarious national psyche of the world's most populous nation."—Kirkus Reviews "[Pomfret] stayed in touch with his Chinese classmates as they came of age, and . . . he deploy...
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 50
 Extraordinary August 6, 2006
Seth Faison (Princeton, NJ)
58 out of 65 found this review helpful
An outstanding book. There really is no better way to tell the story of China's incredible transformation over the past 25 years than through the lives of a few well-chosen characters. Pomfret delivers, beautifully. In a winning narrative, he skillfully braids the intricate tales of several classmates from Nanjing University, where Pomfret went in 1981, bunking with seven roommates in a tiny dorm room. Together, taking a variety of tracks over the next 20 years, those classmates end up capturing the striking horrors and unpredictable aspirations of the Chinese nation. By keeping in touch with them, as he matures into a first-rate journalist, Pomfret is able to gain a level of intimacy and knowledge about their lives that is unmatched in any narrative about Modern China. His writing is sharp and convivial. His story-telling ability matches the stories themselves, which are unbelievable.
Book-Idiot Zhou confides to Pomfret that he was a tormentor, not a victim, during the Cultural Revoluiton. Later, he alternates teaching Marxist history with deal-making in the urine industry. Song, a born Romeo, falls for an Italian woman and has sneak-away trysts. My own favorite was Little Guan, persecuted at age 11 for wiping herself with a piece of paper that said 'Long live Chairman Mao. She is a cheerful fighter, and bucks the odds over and over to succeed.
Pomfret is masterful. Armed with a fluent Chinese and a deft pen, he becomes an outstanding journalist, leading the coverage of Tiananmen, being formally expelled from China, and coming back again as Beijing Bureau chief for the Washington Post to establish himself as the dean of foreign correspondents. His newspaper stories were the gold standard of China coverage for several years. In this book, more than anything, it is his extraordinary ability to learn, ruminate and convey the stories of his Chinese classmates that stands out. Highly recommended.
Superb August 20, 2006
David G. Pierce (Hong Kong)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
Chinese Lessons provides great insight into contemporary China, which John Pomfret has learned to know from the ground up in a quarter century of close involvement with the country and its people.
Pomfret was 21 when he commenced his studies at Nanjing University in 1980, near the beginning of China's reopening to the outside world after the convulsive Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. He has since devoted much of his life to reporting on China.
In Chinese Lessons, his first book, Pomfret skillfully weaves intimate stories of several Nanjing University classmates together with his own personal narrative as an astute observer of the country's explosive transformation from communist hermit to capitalist factory to the world.
The stories Pomfret tells of his classmates and their families stretch back to the revolutionary political movements of the 1950s and 60s and forward to the capitalist present. Through the window of these fascinating lives one sees the corrosive effects of Mao's catastrophic politics on human relationships and beliefs, effects that are still being felt today and will continue to shape the country's future for decades to come.
No great familiarity with contemporary China and its recent past is required to be riveted and informed by this compelling book. Highly recommended.
A Book You Can't Put Down August 17, 2006
Francia R. Stowell (Seattle, Wa)
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
It doesn't happen often that I truly cannot bear to start the last chapter, much less turn the last page, of a book but 'Chinese Lessons' had a grip on me that still won't let go. What a story! I stayed up half the night to finish it and then read parts again.
This is a great book and that is not something I ever say lightly. Pomfret's fine-honed skills as a reporter are everywhere in evidence, as well as the depth of research that stands behind his observations and the conclusions he draws from them. He is a wonderfully gifted writer and has the ability to create multiple personalities and whole scenes with an economy of descriptive and effective words. His love of China is coupled with the objective eye of the true reporter and, there again, the professional shows, but unobtrusively. The thing I love most of all is the many ways in which Pomfret is able to teach his readers without any condescension whatsoever while, at the same time, revealing himself as a colorful, strong and fragile man. He is intimate with us and yet ever more impressive.
After working in Shanghai twice in the '80s I am now not at all sure I want to return to the China of Big Bluffer Ye but I treasure the memories I have even more and feel I have learned more from 'Chinese Lessons' than I would have absorbed in a lifetime of living there. This book is a never-to-be-forgotten work of brilliant reporting, stirring (and often funny) personal history, and true art. A Standing Ovation for John Pomfret!!!
Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China November 20, 2006
John A. Renningjohnre (Auburn, CA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
A five star book. To most westerners, China is a huge enigma and this book sheds light on what is happening in China today. Most westerners have some idea of the horrors of the cultural revolution but may not understand how it permeated the lives of most of the educated Chinese. This book tells those stories and how these five classmates of his have fared,and about how new China works today. His personal story is also very interesting.
A masterpiece January 9, 2007
M. Qiu (USA)
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
After I started reading this book, I couldn't put it down until I finished it all. This is by far the best book I've read about China written by a westerner. Many westerners claim to be an expert on China after making a couple trips to China. But this author really immersed himself into Chinese life to have a very deep understanding of china and her people. He shared a shabby college dorm room with a couple other chinese students in the early 80's - I don't think many westerners had this kind of experience.
Some people may complain that this book seems only focused on China's dark sides. We have to see China did make lots of improvement in many areas in the past 30 years. Maybe just because all the classmates this book covered seemed to have some personal tragidies. Nevertheless, this book is a still a masterpiece because all the characers in the book are real people. and the author did a marvelous job retelling their story with passion and brutal honesty.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 50
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