I worry sometimes about my Education. I always thought it was like, pretty good, I got good grades in a wide variety of subjects, but then something like The Cultural Revolution comes to the fore and I am just astonishingly ignorant. A thing that something like a 10th of the current world population lived under, and I just have no idea what life was like, no anecdotes or stories, maybe I read a paragraph or two in high school and wrote a sentence answer on an exam some time.

Anyways, China in Ten Words is fascinating for providing this insight into daily life that I so sorely lacked. It is, of course, one guy’s perspective and hard to tell how biased it is in what directions, but it is also deeply human. Which is most of what I look for in a book. Yu Hua critiques, sympathizes, pokes fun and tells emotional anecdotes, speaking of his life and experiences and the life that went on around him, with a beautiful voice that comes over quite well in translation.