The Early Arrival of Dreams

A year before the protests in Tiananmen Square, Rosemary Mahoney took part in a teaching exchange between Radcliffe College and Hangzhou University, where she became intimately acquainted with her students and colleagues. This is an account of her experiences.

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A year before the protests in Tiananmen Square, Rosemary Mahoney took part in a teaching exchange between Radcliffe College and Hangzhou University, where she became intimately acquainted with her students and colleagues. Eager to absorb as much western culture as possible, the students embraced Mahoney, who thereby acquired a rare glimpse of Chinese life. This is an account of her experiences. She explains the unsettling mixture of respect and disdain accorded to foreigners and the dreams of and realities facing a people within the confines of their political system. Here, too, are the chance encounters both inside and outside the university - a curious discussion with a Chinese intellectual about the "total absence" of homosexuality in China; a visit to a women's prison where most of the young women were said to be incarcerated for engaging in pre-marital sex. The author won the Charles E.Horman Prize for Creative Writing at Harvard and a Transatlantic Review Award for Creative Writing from The Henfield Foundation. This is her first book.