From The International Herald Tribune:
Sometimes a single person’s life can tell you more about a country’s experience than a shelf full of history books. Among Chinese people of a certain age, such lives, rich in struggle, in suffering and in the consequences of man’s folly and often enough in a measure of redemption, come in abundance.
These are people who are today in their 40s, whose transition to adulthood was hijacked by the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution.