Lin Zhe, one of China's most prolific writers, paints an unforgettable picture of an ordinary family caught up in the maelstrom that was China's most recent century. Her narrative ranges across the entire length of China, to California and back again, to the battlefields of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance and the brutal "struggle" sessions of the Cultural Revolution. But it always returns to this family's home in Old Town, that archetypical,...