On Brittle Ground: My China Journey

When Souchou Yao returns in middle age to the Chinese market town he left as a child, he finds that he is both a stranger and a kinsman; at once a tourist and a native son. His encounters with family members who suffered the terror and persecution of Mao’s Land Reforms, and his intimate observations of how the new China is still haunted by its past, are interleaved with personal reflections and mixed emotions. Can one justify the sacrifice of millions of lives in building a brave new world? Is destruction the inevitable price of progress? Can an exile ever go home again? On Brittle Ground is a moving chronicle of a journey home and a poignant reminder that new life may spring from catastrophic events, and new fires flicker among the ashes of the old. In Souchou Yao’s beautiful prose narrative, unresolved paradoxes give way to the wisdom of acceptance. Though some things change, other things never change — ‘You need a home to feel the ecstasy of restlessness’.

Michael Jackson

Distinguished Professor of World Religion, Harvard University

Souchou Yao is a cultural anthropologist and writer. He is the author of several books: House of Glass: Culture, Modernity, and the State in Southeast Asia (2001); Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, Practice and the Myth of Chinese Enterprise (2002); Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (2007); The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small, Distant War (2016); and numerous articles. He and his wife, the artist Simryn Gill, live and work in Port Dickson, Malaysia and Sydney, Australia.