Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing Based on the letters she wrote home, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking is both affecting and hilarious. Throughout the following year in an extraordinary Alice-in-Wonderland world where ‘education’ consisted of shovelling rubble, hand-grenade practice and cripplingly tedious ideological lectures, Frances never lost her sense of humour. Virtually closed to outsiders for the preceding decade, China was just beginning to make tentative moves towards the outside world when Frances and her fellow students were driven through the dark silent countryside to their new quarters at the Foreign Languages Institute. China’s Cultural Revolution Frances Wood, Hand-grenade Practice in PekingĬhina in 1975 was a strange, undiscovered country, still half-mad from Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when young Frances Wood boarded a plane in London to study for a year in Peking.
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