Chinese Awakenings: Life Stories from the Unofficial China

This is a superb book-- still quite readable in 2010 (when i've just read it) as when it was published in 1995, despite the MASSIVE changes that China has undergone during this interval of time.Chinese Awakenings is simply laid out... Various chapters are devoted to individual or family lives of Chinese citizens whose lives have undergone trauma, tragedy and minor or major triumphs. Just the opening chapter alone is worth the price of the book--featuring the not always harmonious interpersonal dynamics between Jin (who has largely left her village life for that of a newly urbanized seamstress employer), her husband Peng (still a self-effacing country doctor who rues the competitive individualism that is spreading throughout China in place of the collectivist "service" ideals of the better aspects of Maoist-style communism), and one of their adult children, Greg (an independent-minded, Westernized doctor with strong progressive values, who joined the protestors at Tianamen Square in 1989). This well-chosen opening chapter allows many of the main conflicting themes and dramatic events of modern China to be depicted by the Tysons as vivid, living history.The second chapter features Zhang Guoxi, who, from humble and extremely challenging beginnings as a not-particularly-talented but eager to learn young woodcarver, pioneered free enterprise in the PRC and by the late 1980s was China's richest man, surviving harrowing times during the anti-bourgeois Maoist fanaticism of the 1970s.And so on with many other stories of these always highly interesting individuals and their relations.The Tysons are extremely sensitive listeners, observers and reporters who have made these people so REAL that you want to bring them over here to your home in the West as if they were long-lost brothers and sisters from another realm. Their hopes and dreams, sorrows and joys are so remarkably vivid, due to the Tysons' empathetic yet quite honest telling.I wish every country in the world could have its modern-era story told through the eyes, (often aching) hearts and (very often aching) bodies of its people by journalists as talented as the Tysons.I've read a fair amount on China over the decades, especially aspects of its modern spiritual re-awakening (e.g., see the wonderful works of Bill Porter).But China's history from the 1940s to 1990s really comes alive in this telling.Everyone reading more "up to date" books on China certainly should not miss out on this one, which provides an expert, broad yet also deep context for the powerful social, secular, financial, and demographic changes on which China is riding deeper into this 21st century.