John Pomfret went to China to study in 1981, and considered himself lucky to be among the first Americans able to travel to a communist country that was still hostile to most of the world, including the US. China and the US had established diplomatic relations, opening a new era of cooperation in education as well as many other fields. Pomfret studied at Nanjing University for three years, and the book he has written is a collection of stories, some very tragic, of his contacts and friendships with young Chinese whose lives and personal histories were totally different from his own. These friendships remain strong to this day, more than 20 years later. In 2004, he returned to China as a correspondent for the Washington Post, and was able to meet some of his former classmates at Nanjing University.

What makes those stories so unique is the fact that they all are stories of people who bear some of the burden of China's past. They tell the tale of one of the most disturbing and destructive periods in China, describing the years of the Cultural Revolution that lasted a decade beginning in 1966. Those who survived bear scars - both mental and physical - that can never be fully erased.

Pomfret had a taste of life under Communist China, and he relentlessly recounts it throughout the book as he tells the stories of his classmates. In his early days in Nanjing, while he was trying to adjust to the harsh living conditions, he says, "I felt giddy at being in China, learning to survive and thrive in an alien environment. China is as close as I could imagine to living on another planet."

What about the people who live and have to spend their entire lives in China? Zhou Lianchun was one of Pomfret's classmates. As a youth during the Cultural Revolution, he took part in beating up an old woman in a village in northern Jiangsu Province in 1966. Zhou was then 11 years old, and was proud to belong to the Red Guards, who were responsible for carrying out Mao Tsetung's Cultural Revolution. Mao launched the movement to repair the devastating mistakes he made during the Great Leap Forward, after which tens of millions of Chinese died because of the resulting famine. In 1968, when he was 13, Zhou was leader of a group of 13 people, which carried out a policy ordered by authorities of torturing and humiliating people. One of the victims was "Big Mama," the woman who raised him as a son even though she was not his biological mother. Zhou forced her to confess her so-called mistakes as a capitalist in front of the villagers. But after each humiliating public sessions, both of them returned home where she continued to cook for him. The Cultural Revolution turned brothers against sisters and children against parents as Chinese people were forced to learn the arts of torture and humiliation. Many years later, Zhou recounted in conversations with Pomfret how little choice young people in China had when the Cultural Revolution turned the country into a place of hell for families, the elite and teachers. Zhou said if there were so many people tortured in China it was because there were many torturers.

"I did what I was told and, being eleven, I liked it," Zhou told Pomfret. Other classmates recounted their own experiences when as students they were told to attack their own teachers. In 1966, students were told to go to the home of Wu Tianshi and Li Jingyi, two prominent educators in Jiangsu Province. The couple was beaten to death after they were paraded in streets. They were among the first deaths of the Cultural Revolution. Their son, Wu Xiaoqing, known also as Old Wu, was one of Pomfret's classmates. The book dwells also on the ways Chinese people view romance, sex and Western culture, which can be contrary to the tradition and social behavior in China. During the years Pomfret studied in Nanjing, young Chinese were growing up with more and more exposure to Western ideas. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping declared that China should adjust to Western-style economics and that getting rich is not something to be ashamed of. Then the events at Tiananmen Square exploded in June 1989. When Pomfret returned to Nanjing as a Washington Post correspondent, he saw changes that scarred him. "The energy of Nanjing, of all of China, amazed me," he writes toward the end of the book. "It was awe-inspiring, scary, sexy, ridiculous, sad and wondrous. It made me afraid of China, though proud to have been around to witness the changes."