This book starts with a Chinese boy so privileged and pampered that, at 21, he can’t open his own suitcase, let alone unpack it. It closes at the opposite end of the social scale with a small girl squatting on a plank over a village cesspit, watching the maggots seething and squirming far below as they struggle to climb the sides of the pit towards the light.
The cesspit was the only place where a child of five could find refuge from back-breaking labour in the fields. ‘Granny said girls who don’t work get no food,’ she tells Xinran, who meets her two decades later as a student working for her doctorate in Europe. She says that the cesspit maggots, endlessly crawling up and nearly always falling back, remained for her ever afterwards an indomitable image of perseverance, courage and hope.
Both boy and girl are only children. Both belong to the tidal wave of students spilling out of China around the turn of the millennium, the first few generations of only children, all of them much cherished and relatively affluent, a phenomenon without precedent in their own country or anywhere else.
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