Book description
China Witness
is the personal testimony of a generation whose stories have not yet
been told. Here the grandparents and great-grandparents of today sum up
in their own words - for the first and perhaps the last time - the vast
changes that have overtaken China's people over a century. The book is
at once a journey by the author through time and place, and a memorial
to those who have lived through war and civil war, persecution,
invasion, revolution, famine, modernization, Westernization - and have
survived into the 21st century. We meet everyday heroes, now in their
seventies, eighties and nineties, from across this vast country - a herb
woman at a market, retired teachers, a legendary 'double-gun woman', Red
Guards, oil pioneers, an acrobat, a female general, a lantern maker,
taxi drivers, and more- those whose voices, as Xinran says, 'will help
our future understand our past'. Born in Beijing in 1958, Xinran was a
journalist and radio presenter in China. In 1997 she moved to London,
where she wrote her bestselling book The Good Women of China
. Since then she has written a regular column for the Guardian
, appeared frequently on radio and TV and published Sky Burial, What
the Chinese Don't Eat,
a novel (Miss Chopsticks)
, and Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother
. Her charity, The Mothers' Bridge of Love, was founded to help
disadvantaged Chinese children and to build a bridge of understanding
between the West and China.
