Joseph Yen’s Book of Dreams

Happy to have been asked to blurb Joseph Yen’s memoir, Book of Lost Dreams (Earnshaw Books) of Mao’s China translated by Stephen Hallett and Wang LiliLili…..

“A fascinating memoir of troubling times in China, Joseph Yen offers a very personal description of the dramatic changes from tradition to modernity, the passage of endless political movements and his own discovery of his sexuality with charming honesty.” – Frances Wood, Former Curator Chinese Collections, British Library; author of ‘Did Marco Polo Go To China’, ‘Great Books of China’ and other works

“A very personal memoir of a country in civil war, revolution and times of jarring change when a family collides with the new political realities of China’s tumultuous, and often disastrous, rollercoaster twentieth century.” – Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking

Joseph Yen was born in Shanghai in 1942 and moved with his mother to Beijing in 1946, as China was still gripped by civil war. He witnessed first-hand the Communist victory and the steady tightening of the CCP’s control over the years that followed. He went on to study English language and literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute and, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, was assigned to work at Radio Peking. As political campaigns deepened, many of his friends and colleagues became entangled in factional struggles. Joseph himself was sent down to the countryside to ‘learn from the peasants’, an experience that convinced him he had no future in his homeland. In 1975 he was permitted to visit his father in Hong Kong, after which he left China and settled in England. He pursued a distinguished career as a broadcaster and journalist with the BBC Chinese Service, producing programmes and commentary for Chinese audiences worldwide. He is now retired and lives in London.