Books: Mao's Misfits

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Chen Jo-hsi reserves a special scorn for devotees of those I've-been-to-China travelogues that portray a China far more unreal than her fiction. Nixon's Press Corps shows the enforcers of the Communist Party requiring entire neighbor hoods to tear down their makeshift laundry drying racks suspended from people's dwellings so that they will not be eye sores for the foreign visitors. In fact, the visitors never turn up. The lesson here is that often the most difficult struggles come, not in grand political arenas, but in the small and petty matters of every day life. With the American press safely out of the way, the people set about the tasks of reconstructing the details of their lives. But, "long after Nixon left China and arrived back in the United States," Chen concludes, "the drying racks in our dormitory had still not been completely rebuilt."