Author Description

A remarkable first novel that chronicles the emotional and psychological awakening of a disaffected Chinese girl during the unrest of Tiananmen Square; Lili grows up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, watching while her parents are branded as disreputable intellectual. When they are sent out of Beijing for 'reeducation'. Lili accompanies them and endures her own humiliations. Whatever idealism she may have had is thwarted by the oppression of daily life - she is paralyzed by cynicism, indifference, and self-loathing. But when the decades of smouldering anger and resentment borne by ordinary people suddenly ignite in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, Lili comes powerfully awake to a political and personal understanding she might never have been able to achieve otherwise. Herself noted as a 'young hooligan' and recently set free from prison, Lili embarks on an affair with an American who has a very different view of China to her, and prepares to stand, with her peers, in defiance before her oppressors. Written with a bracing rawness and immediacy, Lili bears sharp-eyed witness to historical events by telling a story whose psychological and emotional veracity is both irrefutable and utte