6 Tanyin Alley

The daily lives of ordinary people caught up in the Cultural Revolution that shook the People's Republic of China are depicted sensitively in this first work of fiction by a Beijing journalist ( Two Years in the Melting Pot ) who uses the raw material of his own experience. In the stories of 10 poor families who live around a central courtyard in a back-alley Beijing slum, the great social experiment of the Mao period is enacted in varying degrees. The focus is on a young couple whose marriage, unromantic by Western standards, endures through physical deprivation, separation by internment on a labor reform farm and the dawning of their betrayal by the system. The families in the courtyard are a colorful collection of the old, wedded to ritual and reverence, and the young, doctrinaire and restless. The full range of human emotions is expressed--even, surprisingly, optimism, sounded in Liu Zongren's concluding hope for a blend of China's mighty past with the unsettling present. In endowing his characters with an appealing humanity, the author makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of how his people survived a terrible era. (June)