The Early Arrival of Dreams

A year before the protests in Tiananmen Square, Rosemary Mahoney participated in a teaching exchange between an American college and Hangzhou University in China. Eager to absorb as much Western culture as possible, the students embraced Mahoney and allowed her a rare glimpse of Chinese life. In this book she conveys the unsettling mixture of respect and disdain accorded foreigners, and the dreams and grim realities faced by a people within the confines of their political system. She relates chance encounters such as a discussion with a Chinese intellectual about the "total absence" of homosexuality in China, and a visit to a women's prison where most of the young women were supposedly incarcerated for engaging in premarital sex. Rosemary Mahoney won the Charles E. Horman Prize for Creative Writing at Harvard.