3 Books For Understanding China
If you want to understand a country, listen to its women.
After an entire childhood stuck firmly within the trappings of the English Canon, I read my first Chinese author a few months before my sixteenth birthday. Her name was Jung Chang and reading her literally changed my life.
For the next decade, I read nothing but Chinese women's literature. I spent my evenings locked in with their lives, dreams and sometimes deaths. I lived in a world not dominated by the rhythm of election campaigns, but by the inevitable to-and-fro of front lines and civil war.
Having spent the better half of a decade among the country's writers, I made an immigrant of myself and moved to China.
Of course, the reality of life in China defied much of what has been published beyond its borders. Many of the writers I came of age with lived in de facto exile in England or the United States and hadn't been home in years. Their books and ideas were not only left unreflected in the modern, fast-paced China I found myself confronted with, but were…
