Other Rivers

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.

This discipline was part of the emphasis on efficiency: if children were orderly, they wasted less time.

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.”

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

The Catholic University of Peking, known in Chinese as Fu Jen, had been established by Benedictines from Pennsylvania in 1925.

the current students seemed nearly as romantically inexperienced as the previous generation had been. This contradicted the notion of a more individualistic generation, but students often told me that their personal development had been stunted by the intensely competitive environment of high school.

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

Also like rural Chinese, they generally downplayed any good news. In letters they came across as brutal realists:

my body was experiencing something that must be common to young Chinese. The Party had created a climate so intense that the political became physical.