Chinese Lessons
five classmates and the story of the new China
John Pomfret

As one the first American students admitted to China after the communist revolution, John Pomfret was exposed to a country still emerging from the twin tragedies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Crammed into a dorm room with seven Chinese men, Pomfret contended with all manner of cultural differences, from too-short beds and roommates intent on glimpsing a white man naked, to the need for cloak-and-dagger efforts to conceal his relationships with Chinese women. Amidst all that, he immersed himself in the remarkable lives of his classmates.

Beginning with Pomfret’s first day in China, Chinese Lessons takes us down the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982: Old Wu’s father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; Book Idiot Zhou labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; and Little Guan was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father. As Pomfret follows his classmates from childhood to adulthood, he examines the effect of China’s transition from near-feudal communism to first-world capitalism. The result is an illuminating report from present-day China, and a moving portrait of its extraordinary people.

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Reviews

Pomfret's stories are riveting in their colour and detail ... your empathy centre would have to be cauterised not to respond to Chinese Lessons.
- Australian Literary Review

A highly personal, honest, funny and well-informed account of China’s hyperactive effort to forget its past and reinvent its future
- The New York Times Book Review

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.
 
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 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.
- James R. Lilley, former U.S. Ambassador to China and chief of the American Mission in Taiwan
 
Published

USA 2006 (Henry Holt), Australia 2007 (Scribe), Brazil 2009 (Landscape)

John Pomfret

Raised in New York City and educated at Stanford and Nanjing universities, John Pomfret is an award-winning journalist with The Washington Post. He has been a foreign correspondent for 15 years, covering wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq, southwestern Turkey and northeastern Iran. Pomfret has spent seven years covering China – one in the late 1980s during the Tiananmen Square protests and then from 1998 until the end of 2003 as the bureau chief for The Washington Post in Beijing. Pomfret speaks, reads and writes Mandarin, having spent two years at Nanjing University in the early 1980s as part of one of the first groups of American students to study in China. He has been a bartender in Paris and practiced Judo in Japan. In 2003, Pomfret was awarded the Osborne Elliot Award for the best coverage of Asia by the Asia Society. He is married to a Chinese entrepreneur and has two children. Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China is his first book. John Pomfret attended the Melbourne Writers' Festival in 2007.