"Tianyi - his name signifies destiny - is a painter whose life coincides with perhaps the most turbulent era in China's vast history, from the Sino-Japanese War through the end of the Cultural Revolution. Raised in a world whose ageless traditions were on an irreversible collision course with modernity and the West, Tianyi is seduced by the "otherness" of Western, and specifically European, cultures through exposure to their art, music and literature.".

"Answering the "call of the West," Tianyi heads to Paris on a painting scholarship; it is April 1948, he is 23 years old. His nine-year stay in Europe as an indigent student and artist is dominated, as is the case for any visitor in a foreign land, at once by his discovery and his embodiment of the "other."".

"Destiny, this time disguised as a letter from his ex-lover Yumei, calls Tianyi back to his homeland. But the China Tianyi had known and cherished in his memory has been supplanted, rendered unrecognizable. His friend, poet and activist Haolang, is tortured and eventually killed in one of Mao's "re-education camps"; Yumei commits suicide before Tianyi's return. Tianyi himself will end up in Mao's camps, tortured, starved, driven mad - an exile in this country that is no longer his own.

Yet their existence transcends their suffering, their lives, as their souls converge with ours on a path beyond time and civilizations."--BOOK JACKET.