Chinese Lessons

A first-hand account of China’s transformation over the past forty years, as seen through the life of an award-winning journalist and his four Chinese classmates.

“A highly personal, honest, funny and well-informed account of China’s hyperactive effort to forget its past and reinvent its future.” —The New York Times Book Review

As a twenty-two-year-old exchange student at Nanjing University in 1981, John Pomfret was one of the first American students to be admitted to China after the communist revolution. Twenty years later, he returned and immersed himself again in the remarkable lie stories of his former classmates. In Chinese Lessons, he tells of Old Wu, whose father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; Book Idiot Zhou, who labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; and Little Guan, who was forced to publicly denounce her father. The result is an illuminating report on China’s transition from near-feudal communism to First World capitalism and a moving portrait of its extraordinary people.

“Pomfret has produced a sobering work of authenticity and insight that will endure as a classic assessment of China’s transformative recent decades.” —Los Angeles Times

“A compelling account of China’s evolution. The communist country’s emergence from isolation and impoverishment has been told before, but rarely in such intimate, and occasionally heartening, detail.” —USA Today