CHINESE LESSONS: Five Classmates, and the Story of the New China is Washington Post reporter John Pomfret’s evocative recounting of the lives of his former classmates in the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. As one of the first American students to live and study with Chinese after the revolution, Pomfret saw the country as few Americans had. Leaving China in 1982, Pomfret returned for the Tienanmen Square protests and the crackdown of June 4, 1989. Expelled by the Chinese government at that point, he again returned to live from 1998-2005 as the Post’s bureau chief in Beijing.
“At a time when so many books about China are written from a distance — their authors having spent only a short time in the country, if any time at all — thank goodness for Chinese Lessons.” Wall Street Journal
Pomfret uses the lives of his classmates as a vehicle for telling China’s story, one of the most tumultuous the modern world has ever known. His classmates came from villages and cities; some were Red Guards; others were beaten by Red Guards; some siblings starved to death during the calamitous Great Leap Foward. By 1978, Pomfret’s classmates had crawled back from village outposts and labor camps and succeeded in testing into college. They graduated and constituted the first generation in Communist China’s history to become agents of their own fate. Some went into business; many joined the Communist Party; some were exiled for their political views; others went overseas and found other things, among them religion.
