Letter to a friend pasted in an dsigned by the author. Cover with slight brown marks, see photo. Otherwise clean and tight. No other book so poignantly reveals the travails of the common person and village life under Chinas tempestuous government. He Liyis saga of poverty and hardship is told with humor and a surprising lack of bitterness. Yet his struggle to embrace citizenship speaks for an entire generation of men and women who survived Maos labor camps and the many failed experiments of the Communist revolution. }He Liyi belongs to one of Chinas minorities, the Bai, and he lives in a remote area of northwestern Yunnan Province. In 1979 his wife sold her fattest pig to buy him a shortwave radio. He spent every spare moment listening to the BBC and VOA in order to improve the English he had learned at college between 1950 and 1953. For further practice, he decided to write down his life story in English. Humorous and unfiltered by translation, his autobiography is direct and persona