A Comrade Lost and Found
eBook - ePub

A Comrade Lost and Found

A Beijing Memoir

  1. 336 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

A Comrade Lost and Found

A Beijing Memoir

About this book

A "suspenseful, elegantly written" account of the author's return to China after thirty years to search for the woman she betrayed to the authorities ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).
In the early 1970s, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Jan Wong traveled from Canada to Beijing University—where she would become one of only two Westerners permitted to study. One day a fellow student, Yin Luoyi, asked for her help getting to the United States.
 
Wong, then a starry-eyed Maoist from Montreal, immediately reported her to the authorities, and shortly thereafter Yin disappeared. Thirty-three years later, hoping to make amends, Wong revisits the Chinese capital to search for the person who has haunted her conscience. At the very least, she wants to discover whether Yin survived.
 
But Wong finds the new Beijing bewildering. Phone numbers, addresses, and even names change with startling frequency. In a society determined to bury the past, Yin Luoyi will be hard to find. As Wong traces her way from one former comrade to the next, she unearths not only the fate of the woman she betrayed but the strange and dramatic transformation of contemporary China. In this memoir, she tells how her journey rekindled all of her love for—and disillusionment with—her ancestral land.
 
"Gone is the semirural capital where the author's 'revolutionary' course of study included bouts of hard labor and 'self criticism' sessions. In its place are eight-lane expressways lit up 'like Christmas trees,' shiny skyscrapers and the largest shopping mall in the world. Wong is a gifted storyteller, and hers is a deeply personal and richly detailed eyewitness account of China's journey to glossy modernity." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

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Yes, you can access A Comrade Lost and Found by Jan Wong in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Maps
  6. 1. Mission Impossible
  7. 2. Life as It Has Always Been Lived
  8. 3. You Can't Get There from Here
  9. 4. No One Left Behind to Say Who Went Where
  10. 5. You Aren't Allowed to Call Anyone an Idiot—in English or Chinese
  11. 6. Is That Why They Call It Chai-Na?
  12. 7. Alumni
  13. 8. The Decade of Disaster
  14. 9. Forbidden City
  15. 10. Building Beijing
  16. 11. Neither of Us Can Handle the Twenty-First Century
  17. 12. Seeing Flowers from a Galloping Horse
  18. 13. Made in China
  19. 14. Stand a Head above Others
  20. 15. It's Like Looking for Her in a Vast Ocean
  21. 16. This Is the Big Boss Culture!
  22. 17. Sex in Da City
  23. 18. Sometimes It Takes a While to Notice What's Not There
  24. 19. The Ten Commandments in English and the Lord's Prayer in Chinese
  25. 20. Women Hold Up Half the Sky; I Never Thought Their Arms Would Get Tired
  26. 21. Move Out Early. Realize Your Dream Early
  27. 22. My Deepest Apologies. I Have Wronged You
  28. 23. They're All Crazy
  29. 24. Stepping into Heaven
  30. 25. Straight to Heaven
  31. 26. Lu Yi's Revenge
  32. 27. Lu Yi's Revenge II
  33. 28. A Grain of Sand, Helping China to Change
  34. Acknowledgments