Author Description

"Armed with the limited conversational Chinese he learned in the U.S. Army during World War II, Sidney Shapiro, a New York lawyer, arrives in Shanghai in 1947 for "a look around." He ends up spending the rest of his life in China." "A foreigner in an alien land, he falls in love with and marries Phoenix, a Chinese beauty and active revolutionary. Entranced by Chinese culture and society, he gradually becomes deeply and personally involved in highly dramatic developments - the defeat of the Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship and the establishment of the People's Republic, Land Reform, the Korean War, the break with the Soviet Union, the war in Vietnam, communes and the Big Leap Forward, the "cultural revolution," the Tiananmen Square Protest, economic reforms, the opening to the West, and troubled U.S.-China relations."--Jacket.