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Jianying Zha was one of the first Chinese students to arrive in the United States after the Cultural Revolution, a decade that saw her country being cut off from the rest of the world. A bilingual writer with a perspective rooted in both China and the U.S., she has gone on to become one of the most celebrated chroniclers of China’s transformation into a global powerhouse, with celebrated books and influential articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and beyond.
In Trains, her haunting and brilliant new book, Zha turns to the riveting story of her own Chinese family, whose key figures and main dramas closely parallel the arc of modern Chinese history, from the pre-Communist era to the present day. In unforgettable prose and vivid set-pieces, Zha sketches real and metaphorical train journeys to unlock the mysteries of her family’s past—from her grandfather’s forbidden romance as a young revolutionary in France, to her parent’s tortuous punishments during the Cultural Revolution, to her aunt’s halting reemergence from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through the painful choices and wrenching personal tragedies of Zha’s own kin, Trains helps us to comprehend the powerful historical currents shaping China’s unique and potent identity—and to glimpse the deeper cultural and political wells of the world’s largest and increasingly powerful nation.
Jianying Zha is a writer, media critic, and China representative of the India China Institute at The New School. She is the author of Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China and China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture, both published by The New Press. She is also the author of fiction and nonfiction books in Chinese, including The Eighties, an award-winning cultural retrospective of the 1980s in China. Zha has published widely in both Chinese and English for a variety of publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Dushu, and Wanxiang. She lives in Beijing and New York.