My interviewees brought me into their homes. I saw what is passed on from mother to daughter, what is lost, and what is invented afresh.
This is a book about the personal transformations of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, yearning to escape their class destinies.
It is about Leiya, born in a patriarchal rural village, who thinks there should be more to a woman’s life than endless cycles of birthing. It is about June, raised in rural poverty in the shadow of her mother’s death, who finds hope in a teacher flung from afar into her life. It is about Siyue, labelled a bad student, who goes on to change education for others. And it is about Sam, raised by middle-class parents, who finds inspiration in the revolutionaries who made modern China – and who, in their image, wants to remake it again.
With unprecedented access to the lives, hopes, homes, dreams and diaries of her characters over a period of six years, Yuan Yang gives a voice to those whose stories go untold. At a time of rising state censorship and suppression, Private Revolutions is a landmark work that unearths the identity of modern Chinese society – and, through the telling, something of our own.
