"A uniquely experienced observer of China now gives us a novel that recounts the familiar but still mesmerizing events from the rise of Mao to the Tiananmen Square uprising, and the impact of that history on one father and son. At the center: Li Tongshu, one of the few Chinese citizens ever to graduate from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He is married to Vivian Knight, a Chinese American violinist. Tongshu is drawn by Mao's promise "to build a new China," and by the enthusiasm so many other Chinese artists and scientists living abroad express at that prospect. The odds of Tongshu ever having a successful career as a performer in the US are small, and so when the new president of the recently established Central Academy of China offers him a teaching position, he decides to return home with his family. But now, Tongshu will be forced to contend with the erratic and unexpected shifts of a government determined to control the beliefs and convictions of the people; with suspicion of the Western culture that educated him; and with how the fortune and experience his son, Little Li, becomes caught up in the maelstrom of political and ideological upheaval that not only threatens to destroy his family, but that will ultimately destroy the essential fabric of Chinese society"--
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