CHINESE LIVES - Softcover

Xinxin, Zhang

3.97

39 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679720561 ISBN 13: 9780679720560

Publisher: Pantheon, 1988

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Interviews with more than sixty people--from booksellers to sidewalk vendors to prostitutes--shed light on everyday life as well as the great upheavals, of contemporary China

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Language Notes:

Text: English, Chinese (translation)

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 prostitute. 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 andare 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.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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