A 9th-grader, Dapeng Liu, greets the 1949 communist victory in China with awe and confusion. While trying to shed old traditions and fit into the revolution, he's constantly caught between incomprehensible reality and his conscience. Amid his struggles with shifting political dictates, academic and financial adversity, purges, a broken marriage, and loneliness, he learns to swim in the stormy sea of Mao's first decades in power. As his professional achievement and ideological remolding win Party favor, he quietly maps a path to a brighter future and his lost love. One of the readers dubbed it "The Chinese Dr. Zhivago." This coming of age story set in China from 1949-1965 during the Mao Zedong Era portrays a fate inextricably intertwined with the way Chinese people lived during the formative stage of modern China. Han-ping Chin's historical autobiography fills the niche left by Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award, and other modern Chinese writers. "Both epic and personal, this novel chronicles two decades of love, loss, history, and culture-and the complex tensions that arise from these forces-during the turbulent Mao era." -Kirkus