Under Red Skies: The Life and Times of a Chinese Millennial
Karoline Kan
Hurst: 2019
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Today’s Beijing is assiduously digitised, connected, monitored and manicured. In some ways it feels like a theme park of itself, where facades scaffold over centuries-old stonework. The skeleton of the city will always be there, but the people who make it what it is are always on the move. As demolition and “renewal” continue to be the city planners’ modus operandi, the memories and stories of locals become even more urgent.

Karoline Kan was born in 1989, in Chaoyang, a village in Ninghe County, northeast of Tianjin. At the time, the county was dotted with 1.6-acre (ten mu) farm plots, famous for rice, reeds and fish. By the end of her memoir Under Red Skies, we see Ninghe’s towns transforming into residential high-rises. Not only does Kan’s rural birthplace integrate into a suburb of Tianjin, but Tianjin integrates into the vast Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei economic zone. Today, the fast train from Beijing slides you into Tianjin in an easy thirty minutes. When passed at 300 kilometres an hour, the surrounding towns and villages blur into a single vision, indiscernible from the train carriages.

As bullet trains reduce travel times and construction erases village pasts, Under Red Skies gives the reader a window into key moments otherwise consigned to rubble. Kan manages both to convey the rapid pace of China’s economic transformation and to capture intimate moments of lived experiences. In ways that hard economic data fail to express, Kan’s childhood memories show us both the ordinary and the extraordinary of daily life.

Kan provides a counterweight to the occasional starry-eyed appraisals of China’s political system as a powerful social equaliser. To some readers, Kan’s story may seem the perfect rural-girl-made-good tale, yet she is eager to convey the limits of such narratives. At almost every point in the young author’s life, from her birth as a second child in the era of the one-child policy, to her enrolment in a primary school in a neighbouring town, to her admission into a competitive high school, Kan’s family are required to dispense years of savings into the well-lined pockets of officials and administrators and their opaque bureaucracies. The process is onerous in investment, maddeningly uncertain in its rewards and not designed for its participants to succeed.

• Tags: Alice Dawkins, China, Issue 16, Karoline Kan