Books on Monday: Chinese Lessons

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Before Mao Zedong, China swarmed with largely unsupervised American missionaries. When John Pomfret studied history at Nanjing University in the early Eighties, he was one of a highly-scrutinized handful of Yanks. In Chinese Lessons, he combines a measure of his own experiences with the lives of his classmates, most of whom suffered terribly in the Cultural Revolution. A great deal of insight is packed into this engaging account.