
Private Revolutions
Four Women Face China's New Social Order
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Narrated by:
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Crystal Yu
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Gabby Wong
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Kae Alexander
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Naomi Yang
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Yuan Yang
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By:
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Yuan Yang
About this listen
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE PICK
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
“Riveting . . . a powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives.”—The New York Times Book Review
“As powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary.”—British Vogue
A sweeping yet intimate portrait of modern China told through the lives of four ordinary women striving for a better future in a highly unequal society
While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.
The product of seven years of intimate, in-depth reporting, this transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. June and Siyue are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Each makes her way to Beijing, June as a young professional and Siyue an entrepreneur. Like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village while her parents send money home; yearning for a different life than those of the women she sees around her, Leiya soon joins her parents in Shenzhen as an underage factory worker. Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam is outraged when her eyes are opened the poor treatment of workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by the authorities.
As the women grapple with government policies that threaten their businesses, their children's access to education, their choice of where to make a home, and, in Sam’s case, their lives, a vivid, damning, and urgent picture emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide—and the courage and perseverance of those caught in the swell.
©2024 Yuan Yang (P)2024 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A portrait both sweeping and intimate—as much a study of a radically changing society as of four very different people.”—The New York Times
“The riveting book that results from Yang’s persistence is a powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives, escape the narrow confines of their patriarchal rural roots and make it in the big city . . . Yang’s reportage offers up raw human stories . . . because she documents each woman’s journey from childhood, including encounters with casual sexism, intermittent personal violence and the impossible weight of parental expectations, we can appreciate just how far they have come as adults —and just how far they have to fall.”—New York Times Book Review
“The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on.”—British Vogue
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Why Fish Don't Exist
- A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
- By: Lulu Miller
- Narrated by: Lulu Miller
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. When his specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation.
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If fish don't exist, do stars matter?
- By K. Ishihara on 12-05-20
By: Lulu Miller
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By the Fire We Carry
- The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
- By: Rebecca Nagle
- Narrated by: Rebecca Nagle
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.
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So great to see the full story after This Land pod
- By S. Armor on 04-12-25
By: Rebecca Nagle
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Crooked Seeds
- A Novel
- By: Karen Jennings
- Narrated by: Fiona Ramsay
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a years-long drought, the nearby mountains threaten to burn, and the queue for the water trucks grows ever longer. In her crumbling corner of a public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her land, after decades underground.
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Sad, disgusting and not an intelligible metaphor
- By april on 04-23-24
By: Karen Jennings
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Fundamentally
- A Novel
- By: Nussaibah Younis
- Narrated by: Sarah Slimani
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.
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Narration was Fantastic
- By Ameera on 05-15-25
By: Nussaibah Younis
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The Peepshow
- The Murders at Rillington Place
- By: Kate Summerscale
- Narrated by: Nicola Walker
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.
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The details
- By Avid series reader on 05-09-25
By: Kate Summerscale
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Raising Hare
- A Memoir
- By: Chloe Dalton
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.
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A beautiful reading of a heartfelt story. I didn’t want it to end.
- By Sparrow on 04-02-25
By: Chloe Dalton
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Wild Thing
- A Life of Paul Gauguin
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Gauguin's legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved.
By: Sue Prideaux
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Embers of the Hands
- Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
- By: Eleanor Barraclough
- Narrated by: Eleanor Barraclough
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In imagining a Viking, a certain image springs to mind: a barbaric warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorize the hapless local population of a northern European town. Yet while such characters define our imagination of the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. Instead, in the time-stopping soils, water, and ice of the North, Eleanor Barraclough excavates a preserved lost world, one that reimagines a misunderstood society.
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Author is an excellent reader!
- By K on 02-11-25
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Soldiers and Kings
- Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
- By: Jason De León
- Narrated by: Jason De León
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords.
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Honest and enlightening
- By Amazon Customer on 04-17-24
By: Jason De León
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Other Rivers
- A Chinese Education
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Hessler
- Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, an experience chronicled in his book River Town, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with many of the people he had taught in the 1990s.
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The accuracy of observations. The outstanding perspective.
- By Ray Chou on 03-14-25
By: Peter Hessler
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Some People Need Killing
- A Memoir of Murder in My Country
- By: Patricia Evangelista
- Narrated by: Patricia Evangelista
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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For six years, journalist Patricia Evangelista documented killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of then president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs—a crusade that led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of terror created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.
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Felt like a missed opportunity
- By Patrick Edward Shanahan on 10-31-24
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The Thinking Machine
- Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
- By: Stephen Witt
- Narrated by: Stephen Witt
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In June of 2024, thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of video game equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer. Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI.
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A wonderful book!
- By John K. Clark on 04-13-25
By: Stephen Witt
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