Letters From Nanjing: Letters to Home From Jiangsu Province to Kansas, Recording First Impressions of China

With China in the news almost daily now, it's hard to imagine a time when it was much less prominent on the world stage and much less prosperous. This is a "before" book so to speak. Before the rapid growth the country experienced from 1990 on, before the dramatic change in the large urban landscape - think Beijing and the world class architecture there and elsewhere in China, and the high speed trains across the country now to name two. This book, a collection of letters, briefly captures that period, as the author lived day to day in 1990 Nanjing while he taught at Nanjing University. These letters of discovery written to the family back home record the sites and sounds and senses of that ancient capital then and by extension, to some degree, China itself at the beginning of that decade.