City gate, open up

"A magical, impressionistic autobiography by China's legendary poet, Bei Dao. In 2001, to visit his sick father, exiled poet Bei Dao returned to his homeland for the first time in over twenty years. He had been in exile since the Tianenmen Square uprising. The city of his birth, however, was totally unrecognizable. "I was a foreigner in my hometown," he writes: "my "city that once was has vanished." In this lyrical autobiography of growing up in Beijing--from the birth of the People's Republic, through the chaotic three years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution--Bei Dao uses his extraordinary gifts as a poet and storyteller to create another map of the city, a beautiful memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors that mixes personal narrative and geography with the momentous history he lived through. At the center of the book is his family of five--and their everyday life together through famine and festival. City Gate, Open Up is told in an episodic, fluid style that moves back and forth through the poet's childhood, recreating the smells and sounds, the laughter and danger, of a boy's coming of age during a time of great change and upheaval"--