Reading Qin Xiaolong's Years of Red Dust, a series of short stories based upon the lives of the people of an old street in Shanghai over the course of some 60 years, was a palliative to all the drier histories of that period. Qin's skill involves not only drawing vividly the individual vignettes of lives in rapid change and adaptation, without overt political comment, but also in backgrounding these very personal stories within their historical context. He does this by the simple device of beginning each chapter with a blackboard analysis of the year's political events (the same blackboard is used by characters in the lane as an ersatz CCP teaching device), then allowing his characters to fill the space beyond with their lives. In this sense the book operates like a script, the stage directions establishing conditions for the characters to exist within. The first of these finds us back in 1949, with the CCP triumphant.

This wordy paragraph (my apologies) should really just have said that I liked the book and can recommend the author, who incidentally, also writes fiction and translates Tang Dynasty poetry. On the basis of a fragment of Tang poetry quoted in one of the stories in Years Of Red Dust, I bought an anthology of poetry from this period for my kindle. The translations into English may be a little dated now but nevertheless it is a delightful read.