Dimensions
130 x 197 x 20mm
Lili grows up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, watching while her parents are branded as disreputable intellectuals. When they are sent out of Beijing for "re-education", Lili accompanies them and endures her own humiliation.
Whatever idealism she may have had is thwarted by the oppression of daily life - she is paralysed by cynicism, indifference and self-loathing. But when the decades of smouldering anger and resentment borne by ordinary people suddenly ignite in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, Lili comes powerfully awake to a political and personal understanding she might never have been able to achieve otherwise.
Herself noted as a "young hooligan" and recently set free from prison, Lili embarks on an affair with an American who has a very different view of China to her, and prepares to stand, with her peers, in defiance before her oppressors.
Written with a bracing rawness and immediacy, 'Lili' bears sharp-eyed witness to historical events by telling a story whose psychological and emotional veracity is both irrefutable and utterly compelling.
