This jolting memoir will make you wonder about the pasts of the people we meet in China: the bathroom attendants, clerks, or teachers -- where did they spend the 1960s and 70s? What have they survived? Anhua Gao offers her own story as a clue to millions of other, unrecorded lives. She tells of her life in Nanjing, beginning with her privileged but too few early years as the daughter of two "revolutionary martyrs", continuing through disillusionment, imprisonment and worse, up to her emigration to England in middle age. Some of the book's events are familiar from histories and other memoirs (like Wild Swans), but they don't affect one any less for that.  (CHN190, $27.95)