I have to admit that I haven't read a whole load of so called anti-China English books about China, nor have I read a whole load of books written by foreign journalists speaking Chinese and think they KNOW China better than anyone else.
But this one, by far, is the best.
John Pomfret didn't bore me with all the facts he knows about China, it's just about people he shared a part of his life with. In his words, it's a story of him becoming a man bit by bit.
Stories about his classmates are so vividly described, that it totally destroyed my sleep. I couldn't stop. All the human stories about Cultural Revolution, the absurdity of that society made me angry.
Maybe it's like every other book about China in the sense that it talks about the same suffering, same breakthrough, same difference of China.
But the reason it's so different is that John Pomfret put him in the stories, snogging a girl in alleyways in the 1980s, living in a 8man dorm where people spits all over the floor, marrying a Chinese in the end...he, unlike other China experts who stands afar or comes close physically yet despises everything Chinese, is a part of China.
In a way, he is Chinese, only without the shadows of communism.
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