Author Description

A college girl in 1930s Peking evolves from disinterest in the masses to a commitment to help them. Wenlin has rich friends, an elite education, a tall boyfriend who drives a black roadster. Yet China is being invaded from the north by the brutal Imperial Japanese Army. The students begin to organize demonstrations against a Chinese government they consider too willing to accede to the invasion. Men students vie for leadership while women become increasingly involved. For the women, this is a particularly volatile time, as they face hard choices involving arranged marriages, concubinage, and even vestigial slave-holding-antiquated practices in a strongly patriarchal society. Wenlin is ambitious, determined, fearless. She's steeled against past losses and future obstacles. While her roommates dread the rapidly encroaching Japanese forces and the growing collaborationist intrigue, she leads them into politics, into the student demonstration that became known as the December 9th Movement. She must then decide her own future.The manuscript of Time to Change Your Vision was discovered in 2020, but it was written at least 35 years earlier, sometime between 1940 and 1986. The date itself is an intriguing mystery. This book is a remarkable first-hand account of China during the Japanese invasion that led up to World War II, offering a window into the lives of young, educated Chinese facing cataclysmic political and military events.