The artisans A vanishing Chinese village

Shen Village in rural southeast China has stood for centuries, but now it is slowly disappearing. The younger generations are moving away, and what once was farmland is now taken over by factories. In this memoir, journalist Shen tells the stories of the people from his now-vanishing hometown. Chronicling 100 years of history, bound by the limits of his father's and grandfather's memories, Shen brings his hometown to life. He devotes each chapter to a craftsman and his family, and as their stories unfold, the interconnectedness of Shen Village becomes apparent. The bricklayer converted to Christianity and burned his ancestral tablets. Even the bamboo weaver's son didn't respect him, yet the village came together to honor him when he died. The barber's heroic acts during the Japanese invasion made him the most revered man in Shen Village. Beautifully written, with an almost mythic tone, each of these vignettes captures a piece of village life and custom during a tumultuous century in Chinese history.

A Chinese journalist's intimate vignettes reveal the lives of citizens from his rural hometown, unearthing a deep layer of Chinese history rarely seen beyond its borders. "When our hometowns vanish, we become rootless people, individual atoms existing in isolation within the ice-cold city," writes Shen at the beginning, lamenting the decline of the village that has been inhabited for centuries. "We who left our hometowns have nothing to rely on, and are anxiously absorbed by the prosperity of urban life. Surrounding us are the faces of familiar strangers." Like many young Chinese, Shen left the village for greater opportunity in the city, horrified by "what seemed to me like a dark future in the village." He left at age 18 and did not return until 2001, 10 years later. "The swift decay of the village shocks me," he writes, with no young people or children to be found. "Virtually every time I return, I see a newly added grave," he writes. "Along with the declining population, one old house after another falls into disrepair and then disappears." The author writes fondly of Mr. He, the bricklayer whose garden was the most beautiful in the village, and how he was one of the first Christian converts and thereby somewhat suspect in a place where the ways of the ancestors were deeply revered. Other characters in Shen's affecting narrative include a tofu maker, a lantern maker, a tailor, a schoolteacher, and a carpenter, all with their own secrets and tragedies. Collectively, their stories transport readers back to a bygone time when the village was turned into an agricultural collective and, later, the period in the 1950s when the people suffered through a famine. Each fully fleshed character represents an element of an often hidden Chinese history; as Shen writes in this eloquent text, "each person, no matter how humble, contains an epic poem of their own." A wonderful portrait of provincial China rendered in a beautifully accessible translation Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.