Chinese Lives: Oral History - Hardcover

Xinxin, Zhang

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394559282 ISBN 13: 9780394559285

Publisher: Pantheon, 1987

Synopsis

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

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0394559282
• ISBN 13: 9780394559285
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 367