The Book on China

There's a lot of mindless chatter about China these days, and the fare on U.S. bookstore display tables doesn't do much to elevate the conversation. China is a fire-breathing dragon, the more alarmist writers declare, or a gold mine for entrepreneurs.

The best books on China portray a fascinating culture, alternately resilient and defensive, and unmistakably human. You may have to dig to find them, but these well-worn favorites are worth the hunt.

In "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," Jonathan D. Spence sketches early 20th-century Chinese history as seen through the eyes of the nation's intellectual elite, whose idealism found patches of sunlight before being crushed by the politics of the day. Spence is a masterly writer, and while any of his dozen volumes on China is worth reading, this is the one I always come back to.

Foreign correspondents who grapple with making China's myriad mysteries accessible to faraway readers often have book-length stories to tell by the end of their sojourns in the Middle Kingdom. Many are flash-in-the-pan, but a precious few, such as Theodore H. White's "Thunder Out of China" and Peter Hessler's "Oracle Bones," manage to capture the mood of a specific time and place while also conveying the country's timeless character. My favorite is " Shark's Fins and Millet" by Ilona Ralf Sues, a Polish-born journalist who sashayed through China in the 1930s and came up with an improbably cutting portrait featuring her encounters with Big-Eared Du, the king of Shanghai's gangsters, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Chinese history has been darkened by periods of horror that today's readers can barely imagine. Bao Ruo-Wang's "Prisoner of Mao" is the harrowing account of an innocent man trapped in China's gulag from 1957 to 1964. He survives a famine (a Chinese labor camp is not a good place to be when people are starving) and psychological torture. But years later, living in Paris, he was able to render the viciousness of the communists' efforts to squeeze all the humanity out of their targets.

The man at the helm in those days, Mao Zedong, was China's most-published author, with millions of little red books to his name. But more than anything, he was a brilliant political infighter. "The Private Life of Chairman Mao," by Li Zhisui, one of Mao's doctors, is an inside look at Communist Party politics and the chairman's manipulations. It opens with a hilarious account of backstage maneuvering over the handling of Mao's corpse and then goes back in time to recount decades of the Great Leader's devious backstabbing.

Chinese fiction is trickier. Because of China's complex literary tradition and heavily politicized culture, Chinese novels don't translate well. Many writers have to move overseas and learn to write in a second language before they're able to develop an authentic voice. Ha Jin's "Waiting" is a deceptively simple novel that clears this hurdle. One exception to the "nothing translates" rule is "Playing for Thrills" by Wang Shuo, whose subversive and quirky take on Beijing's underground society is fast-moving and hysterical.

Sometimes an overlooked little novel is the one that resonates most. For me, that book is "The Maker of Heavenly Trousers," by Daniele Vare, an Italian diplomat who lived in Beijing in the 1920s and '30s. His duties were light, apparently. His novel is a charming take on the complexity of Chinese society that has retained its essential truth. The Chinese have a saying for that -- cha bu duo. But it doesn't translate well.

talk@sethfaison.com

Seth Faison is the author of "South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China."