Panic and Deaf

Educated Youth. The Lost Generation. They served Mao's Cultural Revolution as Red Guards in the late 1960s, only to be sacrificed to that same revolution a decade later when they were rusticated to desolate communes and the wastelands of northern China. When they were allowed to return to the cities, they found themselves dislocated once again, this time by the social and economic upheavals of the post-Mao era. Liang Xiaosheng, a former Red Guard and one of China's most accomplished satirists, follows his compatriots as they make their way through the morass of petty corruption, bureaucratic back-biting, and opportunism that is the new New China. In a tone deceptively light and humorous, Liang expresses the financial and sexual frustration, pathetic mediocrity, and impotent resentment of aging "educated youth" rendered increasingly superfluous by the brash economic dynamism of China's new entrepreneurial class.