The Early Arrival of Dreams; A Year in China

“One year before the protests in Tiananmen Square, Rosemary Mahoney participated in a teaching exchange between Harvard College and Hangzhou University. At Hangzhou she was able to overcome her students' usual rigidity and achieve a rare and intimate glimpse of their culture and their attitudes. This remarkable memoir captures both the dreams and the grim realities her Chinese students faced within the confines of an oppressive political regime. A New York Times Notable Book.”

Reviews

“In her bittersweet memoir of the year she spent teaching English at Hangzhou University in China during 1987-88, Rosemary Mahoney offers us a glimpse of how Communist Party Policy has affected the lives of provincial Chinese intellectuals. Her indictment of the Communist revolution is all the more effective because of the tenderness and sympathy with which she writes . . . it is neither the author's placement within Chinese society nor her freedom as a foreigner that finally makes her book so convincing. Many foreign experts have taught in China before her, and their written accounts, with few exceptions, have been as dreary as the Chinese urban landscape itself. What marks Ms. Mahoney's writing as special is her ability to see, feel and describe in simple but evocative prose . . . her choice of language is so right and so graphic that one almost has the sensation of watching a film. . . A vivid picture of the building frustration that led to the political explosion in Tiananmen Square. . . this lovely book makes us wish that Rosemary Mahoney would return to Hangzhou to let us know in her inimitable way how things have really changed among her friends and acquaintances after this milestone in Chinese history.” --Orville Schell, The New York Times Book Review

“Although Mahoney taught at Hangzhou University before [the] massive student-led demonstrations and massacre of protesters . . . her chronicle will nonetheless complement and probably surpass in depth many of the books written about the massacre and its aftermath.” --The Washington Post Book World

“Mahoney’s eye is compassionate; her style succinct. The inherent contradictions in what she chooses to record are her eloquent comment on this intractable people . . . The Early Arrival of Dreams must be compulsory reading for anyone at all interested in modern China.” --Times Literary Supplement

“An extraordinarily moving and sensitive account of a young American teacher’s effort to work in China and learn from those she came to know. A sensitive, thoughtful, beautifully rendered story.” --Robert Coles

“Beautifully written, with a novelist’s eye for the telling detail, [Mahoney] frees the people of China -- and the country itself -- from the stereotypes that are often attached to observations about this vast country and its enigmatic inhabitants.” --The Baltimore Sun

“Mahoney’s account is distinguished by intelligence, and a fierce sense of the comic and the absurd, yet tempered always by compassion.” --A.G. Mojtabai