John Pomfret

Wall Street Journal Review
The Wall Street Journal
August 8, 2006
BOOKS
The People's Republic in a Group Portrait
August 8, 2006; Page D5

'The tanks," writes John Pomfret, "flattened the fifteen-foot-tall Goddess of Democracy, a plaster-of-paris knockoff of the Statue of Liberty erected
by art students directly opposite the portrait of Mao. I climbed the steps of the martyr's monument to get a better view." He is writing about the dramatic -- and eventually lethal -- events in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
And, yes, he was there. 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." In the early 1980s, Mr. Pomfret studied at Nanjing University, and he went on to
work as a China-based journalist for many years. His book is an account of five of his former classmates, tracing their lives from the early college days through the idealism of the 1980s and on to the go-go China of the '90s and the moral malaise of the current decade. Mr. Pomfret has lived much of this story himself, and his own story is woven throughout, adding a useful outsider's perspective to the narrative's design.

College classmates in the early 1980s: What has happened to them since and
to China?

Soon after U.S.-China diplomatic relations resumed in 1979, Mr. Pomfret decided that he had to study in China. He would later become a China correspondent with the Associated Press and later the Washington Post, admired (and perhaps a bit feared) by his colleagues for his energy and resourcefulness. Even as a student, he seemed to be good at bending Chinese
rules, finagling his way to China and winning permission to live with his Chinese classmates in a cramped dorm.

In "Chinese Lessons," we are introduced in rapid succession to the book's five main characters. Told in alternating chapters, their stories pull us through the arc of recent history, showing us how China's "intellectuals" -- which usually means anyone with a college degree -- have fared in the reform
era.

There is Little Guan, who sacrificed a career so that she could be with the man she loved; Big Bluffer Ye, a power-crazed bureaucrat intent on modernizing Nanjing's chaotic street life; Song Liming, a love-addled writer who becomes an accidental dissident; Old Wu, a prematurely serious young man who ends up taking a job at the university in Nanjing where his parents were killed, the victims of a Cultural Revolution mob in the 1960s; and Book Idiot Zhou, an entrepreneur whose career is side-tracked by the country's
chronic corruption.

These were Mr. Pomfret's friends and classmates, but he doesn't pull any punches. Song Liming becomes an Italy-based dissident but crawls back to China after making a series of sad compromises that essentially force him to renounce his politics. Big Bluffer Ye becomes corrupt and obsessed, in his job as a city planner, with bullying poor migrants. Even Old Wu seems a pathetic figure, opting for a safe career even though it means working alongside some of his parents' killers.

"Chinese Lessons" is not uniformly negative -- Little Guan's tale is a heart-warming story of love, while Book Idiot Zhou makes a series of courageous decisions, choosing, for example, to work as an instructor and teach the usually taboo dark sides of Chinese history. But one "lesson" of these stories is the central problem facing the country today: its spiritual vacuum.

As Mr. Pomfret puts it: "For centuries, Chinese debated what it was to be a good person, a good citizen: What was the Good, the Virtuous and the Right?
Fifty plus years of Communist censorship and political campaigns have silenced those debates, and it is still unclear whether the country has the ability to revive the tradition of asking these timeless questions." In
short, the freeing up of China's commercial life has not meant a comparably freer intellectual atmosphere, in which crucial social questions may be properly addressed.

There is a back-reported feel to some of the book, since Mr. Pomfret clearly lost touch with his classmates at various times and had to reconstruct the
missing years. (Who can plan such a book and keep notes for decades?) And the historical background that Mr. Pomfret provides -- as valuable as it is -- often intrudes on the narrative, as if crammed into the interstices of the story for maximum efficiency.

But these are minor flaws compared with the force of the book's remarkable group portrait and what it shows about China today: Within a generation, and with many missteps along the way, the country has moved from a place of narrow totalitarianism and conformity to one of relaxed authoritarianism and diversity. But it is still hobbled by its inability to discuss its past. The
resiliency of its people, however -- including the figures in Mr. Pomfret's story -- bodes well. A "Chinese lesson," perhaps, for a hopeful future.

Mr. Johnson, a former Journal correspondent in Beijing, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China."

REVIEW OF CHINESE LESSONS, KIRKUS REVIEWS
Among the first Americans to study in China following the communist victory in 1949, Washington Post reporter Pomfret looks back at his student days at Nanjing University in 1981 and the lives of his classmates, survivors of one of the most tumultuous periods in the country's history.

Readers numbed by the catalogue of crimes offered in Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, will find them evoked here with more personal applications to the lives of Big Bluffer Ye, Book Idiot Zhou, Little Guan, Old Xu and Daybreak
Song.

Don't be misled by their jaunty college nicknames. These are the children of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, convulsive political purges unleashed by Mao. They witnessed (and sometimes were forced to act as accomplices to) the humiliation, torture and even deaths of their own parents.

Pomfret sketches each of the five as he remembers them from college, including as well the story of his own student days in a country still ill at ease with foreigners. It's his detailed reporting about their lives before and after graduation, however, that sets this book apart. While knowing that he can't fully comprehend China's tortuous history or its complete effect on his subjects, the author has immersed himself as much as any outsider can in all things Chinese, enabling him to assess each of his subjects with remarkable empathy. He plainly admires these former classmates, but he's clear-eyed about the peculiar ways in which each has been twisted by a tyrannous political system that 30 years ago put "capitalist roaders" to death and today declares that "to be rich is glorious."

It's fascinating to see how each has negotiated adulthood-love, family, work-in a country hurtling toward modernity under the Party's capricious
whip hand. A moving account of individual experiences, indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the precarious national psyche of the world's most populous nation.

"CHINESE LESSONS is an extraordinary book. Through telling the intimate stories of his former classmates, John Pomfret reveals a contemporary China where many individual lives have been thwarted and twisted. This is a book full of insights, honesty, and compassion. It touched me deeply."
-- Ha Jin, author of War Trash and Waiting

"John Pomfret has written a brilliant, insightful book describing the dark side and human cost of the Chinese economic miracle. His feel for China, based on years of living there, his fluency in Chinese, and his reporting genius cut through the sham and spin of much current coverage and superficial impressions that clog the system."-- James R. Lilley, former U.S. Ambassador to China and Chief of the American Mission in Taiwan

"In this intimate and revealing book, John Pomfret shows why he is one of the great China correspondents of his generation: He has never held himself at a distance, but has plunged in, with vigor and an open mind. His approach to China has no tint of romanticism or awe; the lives he discovers and the stories he tells, including his own, are unvarnished, unexpected, and riveting."-- Steve Coll, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars