The world depicted in Lu Yao’s Life—the world of rural China at the beginning of the 1980s—is a world that no longer exists. Nearly four decades on, the center of gravity of Chinese society has shifted from the countryside to the city, in the process gutting villages, dissolving clan cohesion, and collapsing social structures that had existed for millennia. The great dramatic balance of Lu Yao’s tale—Gao Jialin’s hesitation between the virtues of rural life and the thrilling unknowns of urban modernity—has since been decisively resolved. These days, the Gao Jialins of twenty-first-century
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