What Happens When Your Country Transforms Before Your Eyes?
Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang – Tuesday 17th February at 8pm UK time
Private Revolutions follows four women, born during China’s economic reforms, living through forty years of transformation so rapid that each generation grows up in a country unrecognisable to their parents.
And the book never lets you be comfortable. You watch Leiya escape the village only to hit a different kind of ceiling in the city. You see Siyue build a career in private tutoring, finally getting somewhere, and then the government suddenly dismantles the entire industry overnight. You read about Sam’s activism—and watch her face real danger for that choice.
These are stories about ambition and resilience, sure. But they’re also brutally honest about the real human costs and consequences of such a change. Many of the specifics may be about China (and fascinating for the outsider), and others are more generally relevant to such periods of massive change.
Yang brings real credibility to this—she’s a Financial Times correspondent who witnessed press freedom decline in China firsthand, and she spent years embedded in these women’s lives through their diaries and personal narratives. The book is simultaneously intimate and deeply structural. You feel what it’s like to be Leiya or Siyue or June or Sam, and you understand the forces shaping their options.
This connects directly to something we’re exploring this spring: What does it look like to live through historical transformation—whether that’s colonialism arriving in your society, rapid economic restructuring in your country, or deliberate choices you make to transform yourself? Each of our three books this term looks at that differently, in different centuries, different continents, from different angles.
Join us Tuesday, February 17 at 8pm UK time to discuss Private Revolutions.
Register here — you’ll receive additional curated resources when you sign up.
If you haven’t read the book yet but are curious, here are a few ways to get started:
Watch (10 min): Book excerpt read by the narrators – hear Yang’s voice and get a sense of the book’s tone
Listen (22 min): Standard Issue Podcast interview – Yang talks about left-behind children, parenting pressures, and how this work led her to stand for Parliament
Read (8 min): “We’re All Trained to Be Good Obedient Children” – overview of the book’s themes and Yang’s perspective as someone bridging Chinese and Western contexts
This is the middle book in our spring term exploring Living Through Historical Transformation. We’re reading across centuries and continents—from Chinua Achebe’s portrayal of colonialism arriving in Nigeria in January, to Yang’s China in February, to Gandhi’s autobiography in March. Each offers wisdom about what’s possible when transformation arrives (invited or uninvited), and how we maintain agency within forces beyond our control.
Please do join me in this exploration!
Richard @ Not Another Book Club