A journalist plucks select interviews and calls to her radio program to curate a portrait of Chinese women a generation after Mao's 1966 revolution. Most of her chosen stories feature family separation, horrific sexual violence, dehumanization and disposability. All of these, she assures us with stilted sentences, are the work of the party (as if these are not the stories of women in all kinds of places with all sorts of governance models).

I openly scoffed several times. Her journalistic prowess seems to consist of being present, making eye contact, and sobbing. Obviously, from these masterful interview skills, the most improbable sagas unfold in casual conversation.

She seems to loosely track chronology through the book and as she gets closer and closer to immigrating to England, her disdain for China becomes hostility and the pretense of integrity or nuance in reporting falls away completely.