The Piano Tuner

Trade Paperback. Fine. 8vo - over 7æ" - 9æ" tall. Rare book. Translated by Britten Dean. Novel written by "one of the most popular woman writers in the People's Republic today". Few authors give a stronger feeling of what life is like in modern urban China than Cheng Naishan. Her stories set in Shanghai, contain perceptive, compassionate, and sometimes bitingly satirical portraits of China's people. She also writes frankly of the controversial issues of modern Chinese society: women's rights, continuing divisions of social class, the pain and horror of the Cultural Revolution, the invasion of Western ideas and the way to retain the best features of socialism. Her fiction is a blend of the old and the new, where burned-out revolutionaries and the new breed of "Chinese yuppies" live in a sometimes uneasy truce, while the older generation remains perplexed by both. That she is the only major writer in China who is a convert to Christianity adds an unusual dimension to her work. She reveals a far more sophisticated view of China than commonly seen in the Western media. The rigid cold war distinctions of capitalism and communism do not apply here. This is modern China, and there is no simple way to describe it, but in Cheng Naishan's stories we can feel it. 176 pages.