by Ha Jin
First published 1997
In a small Chinese town during the Cultural Revolution, neighbors turn against neighbors and ideology trumps humanity. These twelve interconnected stories follow ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. A teacher faces denunciation by his own students. A young woman must choose between love and political safety. Children learn to betray their parents for the promise of acceptance. Each character navigates a world where saying the wrong thing means exile or worse, where moral certainties crumble under political pressure. Ha Jin captures the daily terror of living under constant surveillance, where survival often requires abandoning basic decency. The stories reveal how ordinary people become complicit in their own oppression, and how small acts of kindness become revolutionary in a system designed to crush individual conscience.
Genres: fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, cultural, asian-american, chinese-literature
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: China
Period: Cultural Revolution
207 pages · Hardcover · Univ of Georgia Pr
Content warnings: violence