Table of Contents:
  • Introduction: Embroidering a tapestry of hope
  • Familial secrets : Mao's famine in Hong Ying's Daughter of the river
  • Aesthetic of heterogeneity : roots in Han Shaogong's theoretical and literary writings
  • Ghostly vision : Zhang Xiaogang's "Bloodline : the big family"
  • Protean youth : redemptive poetics in In the heat of the sun and The postmodern life of my aunt
  • Coda: Ba Jin : toward an ethical relation to history.