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.

Another 9 percent answered that they were unsure if they were straight, gay, bisexual, or something else. “They don’t know!” Zhang told me, shaking his head. “I think that that’s something to worry about.”

Project 985.

A number of educators who attended Dewey’s lectures and classes subsequently tried to incorporate his ideas into Chinese schools. One of these figures was Hu Yanli, who eventually became the principal of Chengdu’s most important primary school.

The numbers 985 refer to a date: the fifth month of 1998, when Jiang Zemin, the leader at the time, had delivered a speech about Chinese education at Peking University.

standard pronoun was first-person plural, as if parent and child had merged:

In 1905, after the Qing dynasty had been weakened by the Opium Wars and other conflicts with Western powers, the examination system was abruptly abolished. Intellectuals were left with an existential question: What should be the purpose of schooling in a modern China?

Chinese narrative genre: the non-personal non-story of a Party man who knows that the system matters much more than any individual.