I asked Emily what she thought was the root of her brother’s problem, she said, “He is a victim of modernization.”

Sichuan University was one of thirty-nine upper-tier institutions that eventually benefited from Project 985, which provided increased funding from the central government.

Like many parts of Sichuan, Chengdu has a reputation for being self-contained—a city of the basin.

Of course it won’t forget, not with the same things happening over and over. Even the cadres of the same Party wore the same expressions while giving the same speeches with the same words.

Since then, the nation’s low figure for college entrance—one out of every twelve young Chinese, or 8.3 percent, in 1996—had risen, in the span of little more than two decades, to 51.6 percent.

The rules didn’t mention individuality, self-motivated study, or other virtues that had been extolled by Hu Yanli, the John Dewey acolyte.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Americans who had grown up in China represented important connections to the United States. The author Pearl S. Buck, who introduced China to so many American readers, had also been born to missionary parents.

If a request was rejected, it was worth trying a different office, a different cadre; in a country of such size, there were always other rivers.

But Christians and queers both represent fringe communities in China, and they are more likely to flourish in a place like Chengdu, far from the nation’s political center. Sometimes, people jokingly refer to the city as “Gaydu.”