The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China
Mahoney spent a year in China teaching English at Hangzhou University, one year prior to the massacre at Tiananmen Square. She found her students earnest, polite, fatalistic, resigned to their dependency on parents and the state. Many were sharply critical of their government, but feared the consequences of outspokenness or protest. While teaching a class on the collapse of the Third Reich, her students unanimously chimed, "Hitler was a great man." She visited a women's prison where inmates, having committed "acts harmful to marriage and family" (presumably premarital sex), were "re-educated." Everywhere she went she found tremendous poverty and backwardness, people suffocating under rules and regulations. With novelistic gifts and an eye for the telling detail, she captures the texture of daily life in a memorable odyssey.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.