Product Description

Wang tells the story of her adolescence during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, much of it spent with her mother in a re-education camp. There, her secret teachers were some of China's foremost thinkers who helped her distinguish truth from propaganda, and her refuge from reality was a pond, her Lily Theatre.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1003791 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 366 pages

NRC Handelsblad
‘One of the most wonderful books that I have read for years .. written in a beautiful, restrained but powerful style'

About the Author
Lulu Wang was born in China in 1960, studied English in Beijing and moved to the Netherlands in 1986. She now lives in Maastricht, and has just published her second book, with a record-breaking first printing of 160,000 copies.

Customer Reviews

The story of two friends growing up in Mao's China
The Lily Theatre by Lulu Wang is a fascinating insight into growing up in Mao's China. The main character is a young girl called Lian, the daughter of intellectuals, whose parents have been banished to work camps as a punishment for counter-revolutionary tendencies. As a result of a period of chronic ill health, she goes to live at her mother's work camp where she is taught and tutored by some of China's finest philosopers and professors, each of whom has been banished as an enemy of the state. Lian's one regret is that she has been separated from her best friend, Kim, a peasant girl who is mercilessly tortured and singled out by her classmates, precisely because of her worker status.

The book examines the roles and social positions of the intellectuals and proletariat in Mao's China. Although Mao's propaganda holds up the peasant farmer as the ideal, in reality this is far from the truth. Peasant families live in abject squalor while the families of intellectuals and politicians, even disgraced ones, live in relative comfort. Adults and children alike are all to painfully aware of the class system that exists; Lian's attempts at integrating Kim meet with failure after failure as her classmates refuse to accept her and take every opportunity to ridicule her.

The story is made more poignant by the fact that Lian helps Kim to improve her grades and helps her to win first prize at the school athletics meeting, which for any other student would mean instant success and popularity. For Kim, it means yet more humiliation, until she turns to a life of crime which up until this point she has resisted.

compelling
Wonderfully funny and charming - descriptions and expressions used were sometimes hilarious, and always perfect. One of those books you want to start reading all over again as soon as it's finished.

An Eye Opener
I bought this book some time ago and for some reason it didn't cry out to me to be the next book on my shelf to be read. I think my perception of what the book was about had deterred me - there seems to have been so many other books relating to China on the shop book shelves of late. Was this just another in a long line?

Well having decided it was high time to read it, I have to say I was really engrossed! The story is told over a fairly short time frame - just a 3 year period. There is a lot of detail of everyday life for the central character Lian, a Chinese schoolgirl at the time of China's 'cultural revolution', but rather than the minutiae becoming boring I found it built up a vivid picture of the effect communism has on day-to-day existence. As the story progresses the sense of the infallibility of the ancient Chinese caste system grows stronger. The book helps you to clearly see the stark differences between the 2 different ways of life and makes you think about which is the most preferable, if either! At certain points I was reminded of George Orwell's '1984' and was surprised to find that his vision of communism was pretty close to the mark.

I found the book educational,interesting and enjoyable to boot!