Sounds of the River

At sixteen, Da Chen leaves his family and rural Fujian for university life in Beijing as China begins to emerge from the Cultural Revolution. The capital brings crowded dormitories, chronic shortages, exacting professors and classmates carrying their own histories of political upheaval. Da studies English and Western literature, forms friendships across social boundaries and learns to negotiate institutions still shaped by ideological caution and personal patronage.

His ambition is to reach the United States, but scholarships and overseas study depend upon academic achievement as well as the approval of powerful university figures. Teaching, reading and encounters with foreign visitors expose him to possibilities largely unavailable in his childhood, while reform-era Beijing changes around him. The second memoir follows his movement from provincial outsider to teacher and successful scholarship candidate, making personal advancement part of a wider account of China’s reopening in the late 1970s and early 1980s.