Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land

An artist paints landscapes of faraway places she has never seen, which are then hung on the walls of homes and offices throughout the world. A migrant worker sorts recyclables and thinks deeply about the soul of his country, while a Taoist mystic struggles to keep his traditions alive. An entrepreneur capitalizes on a growing car culture by trying to convince people not to buy cars but to rent them. And a ninety-year-old woman remembers how the oldest neighborhoods of her city used to be. These are the exciting and poignant, humorous and confusing stories of utterly ordinary people living through China's extraordinary transformations. Chinese Characters is a collection, as Pankaj Mishra writes in his foreword, "to herald a new golden age of journalism about a ceaselessly fascinating country." Contributors include a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a MacArthur Fellow, the China correspondent to a major Indian newspaper, and scholars whose depth of understanding is matched only by the humanity with which they treat their subjects. Together, their stories create a multifaceted portrait of a country in motion and an introduction to some of the best writing on China today.