May You Live in Interesting Times is an intelligent and compassionate work spanning decades of turmoil in China Willem Dijkstra has produced a novel of considerable depth, weaving individual suffering and anguish into a broader tapestry of mass political persecution and terror. Through characters as Xu Suping, Chen Dan and Dao Huimin, Willem Dijkstra not only brings the nightmare of Mao's China sharply into focus, but he also succeeds in capturing the essence of the Chinese: exasperating, stubborn, warm-hearted and eternally resilient. The author has a passion for all things Chinese, but most of all for the people and their turbulent history and promising future.
