Li's article, “The Man Who Eats,” in the New Yorker (September 6, 2004), is a memoir of her grandfather, a former member of the Chinese nationalist army and a formidable man who lived through three regimes, two world wars, two civil wars, famine, and revolution. The piece also contains much information about conditions of life in Beijing when Li was growing up in the 1970s.

China's Son: Growing Up in the Cultural Revolution (2001), by Da Chen, is a story of how one man's life was devastated by the Cultural Revolution. Da Chen came from a landowning family and found himself an outcast in communist China. Told that he could never become more than a poor farmer, he dropped out of school. After the death of Mao in 1976, however, he realized that a college education might still be possible for him. Working long...