Chinese Lives Oral History Author:Zhang Xinxin From Publishers Weekly — Interviewing people throughout China in 1984, the authors, a journalist and a novelist, have compiled an unprecedented look at the People's Republic. The speakers range from an entrepreneurial street urchin selling popcorn, to a convict, a hippie-type young man hiking and biking around the country and a rehabilitated pros... more »titute. One portrait is of a bookstore manager who earnestly defends the country's policy of controlling what books are sold. In his store, he says, to help guard public morality, when customers purchase a copy of "Sex Information and What Newlyweds Need to Know" ... we also make them take a copy of "How to Repair Electrical Appliances." Many of the interviewees are survivors of the Cultural Revolution and are scrambling hard to succeed in China's new climate of materialism; nearly all speak informally and candidly. The result is an appealing, patchwork-quilt portrayal of contemporary life in a nation famed in the West for its inscrutability.
From Library Journal
This book consists of 70-odd short interviews with Chinese people in every walk of life. The pieces, which created a sensation when serialized in China in 1985, present their life stories and attitudes much more realistically than most Chinese reportage or fiction. Part of the original's charm lay in its ear for jargon and idioms from different regions of China, an element lost in this British-supervised translation. Otherwise, the interviews are original, enlightening, and fun to read except when one detects the obligatory notes of obeisance to current political and economic reforms.« less