” While reading it, I often wondered who this often-critical examination was intended for.”

There is a lot to like about Yu’s take on his own country. Having grown up on the tale end of Mao’s China, he has witnessed incredible changes across his life (and some which remain stubbornly unmovable). As the title suggests, he approaches the broader topic through ten key words that partly power Chinese thinking, not all easily translatable to English.

This book is as much memoir as cultural examination, and for me this was a real strength of the work. Rather than drier historical claims, Yu offers dozens of anecdotes and illustrations of the consequences for the Chinese framing of disparity, revolution, writing and reading, copycatting and bamboozling, etc. Most are from his own life and are nearly confessions of behavior (youthful cruelty to those suffering in the name of revolution, for instance). In this way, Yu offers a portrait of China across the last 40 years or so, from its collective impoverishment to its imbalanced abundance, and from its mythologizing politics to its despairing imitations and swindling. While reading it, I often wondered who this often-critical examination was intended for.

Personal, funny, revealing, but too short to be called thorough, perhaps the only disappointment for me in the book was that its structure around ten concepts, while tidy and helpful, also neglected many other aspects of this enormous topic as well as missing a larger framing of how they intersect. Even so, for a late-20th-century look at China as a background to where it is today, I highly recommend it.