Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China

As a twenty-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 in 1949.  Living in a cramped dorm room, Pomfret was exposed to a country few outsiders had experienced, one fresh from the twin tragedies of Mao's rule―the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Twenty years after first leaving China, 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 days 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 years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; Little Guan was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father. As we follow Pomfret's classmates from childhood to university and on to adulthood, we see the effect that the country's transition from near-feudal communism to First World capitalism has had on his classmates. This riveting portrait of the Chinese people will not only change your understanding of China but also challenge your perception of the way fate can shape the course of nations as surely as it has the extraordinary lives of these five classmates.