My Old Home

January 25, 2021
This gripping if occasionally didactic debut novel by Schell (Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century), a director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, touches on the personal and the political in 20th-century China. In 1966, 14-year-old Li Wende witnesses the torture and arrest of his pianist father, a target of the Cultural Revolution. Li Wende then ends up in a labor camp in a remote village in Tibet comically known as “Yak Springs.” In satirical scenes that bring to mind M*A*S*H and Catch-22, nerve-wracking political terror gives way to a hilariously bawdy picaresque featuring a pair of hogs named Nikita and Nina Kruschev who live in a sty beneath the camp’s latrine. Incompetent, vain, and lazy functionaries and glum inmates contrast with the local nomadic yak herders, whom Li Wende befriends to his benefit. After toiling in the camp for 10 years, he returns to Beijing and reconnects with an old friend who has become active in the student-led pro-Democracy movement. Despite the novel’s many charms and Schell’s lush lyrical descriptions, the patchwork of anecdotes doesn’t add up to much of a plot, and frequent asides on Chinese history and culture interrupt the narrative. Still, readers may find the rollicking ride worth the lecture, and there’s no denying the riveting subject matter.

January 15, 2021
Schell's sweeping historical epic charts the coming-of-age of a young Chinese man in his search for identity, belonging, and love across two continents. The novel begins in Beijing, where 14-year-old Li Wende, called Little Li, lives with his father, Li Tongshu, a music professor at the local conservatory. Their lives become increasingly more restricted under Mao Zedong's intensifying Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as the Red Guard frequently harasses anyone who appears sympathetic to Christianity or what they consider Western art or thought--eventually including Little Li and his father. Little Li moves from one kind of exile to another, never feeling at home anywhere. Having been born to a Chinese father and Chinese American mother, Little Li often feels like an outsider in Beijing. He dreams of leaving China to study the flute in the U.S., but his late mother's sister tells him he'll be on his own if he gets there. Torn between the shifting cultural and political influences of Chairman Mao and then Deng Xiaoping, however, his home in Beijing also threatens to become a place he no longer recognizes. From remote labor camps in the mountains of Tibet to seedy hotels in San Francisco's Tenderloin District, each setting is infused with such animated detail that they all seem to come alive. Schell similarly renders Little Li's beloved works of classical music with such tender specificity that the pages almost sing. At times, however, the main characters' lives appear to be the background against which history unfolds rather than the other way around, perhaps owing to Schell's long career as a journalist and historian. Readers will emerge from the novel with keen insights into China's struggle to determine its political, economic, and cultural identity. However, they also may be left without a clear sense of who Little Li really is, despite journeying with him for more than 600 pages. An ambitious journey through history that captivates with its spectacular scenery.

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January 1, 2021
China's Cultural Revolution casts a long shadow over a man's life in this historical novel by leading China-relations scholar Schell (Wealth and Power, 2013). Li Wende's childhood is shattered when Maoist agitators attack his classical-pianist father, smashing his Steinway and mutilating his hands. Before long, it's Li's turn to be accused of Western sympathies, and he is exiled to a penal colony in China's far west, where he chisels stones and plays his flute for the mountain yaks. A confined youth yields to a listless adulthood, and Li tries his luck in San Francisco before returning to a tense Beijing on the eve of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Despite his shifting circumstances, Li remains a man divided between activism and domesticity, Western materialism and Confucian loyalty, the sonatas of Bach and the songs of revolution. Schell has spent a lengthy career immersed in Chinese history and culture, and it shows in his exacting depiction of the tumult that defined Chinese society in the late twentieth century. But his commitment to authenticity, which includes parenthetical reminders of relevant Chinese figures, gives way to a universal tale of displacement and loss.

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