A Book of Changes - Krystyna Horko
When Melissa Bingham grows tired of being a hippie in 1970s London, a series of haphazard events followed by a tragedy lead her to Maoist China. She obtains a scholarship and in the summer of 1976 Melissa, together with a handful of foreign students, arrives in what was then called Peking. Despite the eventful period (the Tangshan earthquake, Mao’s death and the campaign against the Gang of Four), the first year is a disappointment. The foreign students are segregated from the Chinese; classes are rigid and dull. Even her roommate spouts only propaganda. Melissa leaves for Hong Kong the following summer but returns a year later when it becomes clear that things are moving on the mainland. Now change is palpable, and nowhere more so than in Peking’s Xidan intersection that November, where a wall covered in posters has been nicknamed Democracy Wall. Here Melissa meet a young activist called Jianguo and they start an illicit relationship. Now ten years later, in the summer of 1989, ...