Ai-yah! A great many things happened in China during the twentieth century and this gripping autobiography has it all: Warlords, concubines, bound feet, Chinese sayings (both traditional and revolutionary), harsh climate, government officials, arranged marriages, traditional medicine, opium, family ties, suicides, mobbing, Japanese occupation, underground resistance, festivals, Kuomintang, Russian soldiers, corruption, communists, the Long March, miscarriages, Party membership, capital punishment, funerals, denunciation, detention, Mao Zedong, the Great Leap Forward, steel furnaces, famine, little red books, Cultural Revolution, long-distance travels, the Gang of Four, Thought Reform Through Labor, mass relocation, mental illness, barefoot doctors, Deng Xiaoping (and his stepmother), university life, classroom excursions, foreign visitors, and emigration.

I just got an invoice (two invoices actually) from my university dormitory in Darmstadt, where I lived from March 1997 to May 2002. They are asking me to pay 35 Euro building maintenance cost for the first half of 2002. It has been 18 months since I moved out there. I wonder how many of the former students they are still able to reach with this kind of late billing.