Summer Reading Selection

Release date: May 06, 2008 |

This summer, new students at Goucher College will explore the tortuous past 40 years of China’s reinvention by reading and discussing Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China by John Pomfret. The book is Goucher’s 2008 summer reading assignment for incoming first-year and transfer students.

Selected based on suggestions from faculty and staff, Chinese Lessons will spark discussion among new students, staff, and professors during Goucher’s fall orientation session. This summer, incoming students will receive a copy of the book and study guide questions to foster group conversation during a daylong discussion of the book and its themes that will be held on Tuesday, September 2.

As part of the first generation of American college students to enroll in exchange programs with Chinese universities in the early 1980s, then as an Associated Press reporter covering the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square and later as the Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post, Pomfret witnessed one of the great political and social upheavals of modern time. Chinese Lessons is a rich, first-hand account of modern Chinese history as it was lived and experienced by the author and five of his classmates at Nanjing University in 1981.

His classmates were the children of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, convulsive political purges unleashed by Mao Zedong. They came from villages and cities; some were Red Guards; others were beaten by Red Guards; some had siblings who starved to death; some witnessed — and sometimes were forced to act as accomplices to — the humiliation, torture, and even deaths of their own parents.

But by 1978, Pomfret’s classmates had returned from village outposts and labor camps and successfully tested into college. They graduated and constituted the first generation in Communist China’s history who were free to pursue their own courses of action. Pomfret kept track of some of his classmates and over the years looked up others to find out how they had fared. Some went into business; many joined the Communist Party; some were exiled for their political views; others went overseas and found other things, including religion.

In Chinese Lessons, he brings to life their personal tales — sometimes poignant, sometimes distressing, sometimes repulsive — of navigating China’s market-oriented reforms. All of their stories paint a rich portrait of change and conflict in a China that has gone from narrow totalitarianism and conformity to an era of relaxed authoritarianism and diversity.