China Dream

By: Ma Jian, Flora Drew - Translator

Narrated by: David Shih

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

Blending fact and fiction, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future.

This darkly comic fable exposes the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth. It is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state-imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.

©2018 Ma Jian; English translation copyright 2018 by Flora Drew (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

I just really hated the MC

Reactions:

Beginning: am I supposed to hate the main character?
Middle: “He strokes her hair and then puts a lock of it in his mouth and sucks
mmmm you’ve just washed it didn’t you? Delicious.”
I hate the main character. 😩
End: Maybe this is what happens when you spend your whole life trying to avoid your past, instead of dealing with it. I still hate the main character.

A little confusing. I could not tell what was part of the dream and what was part of the story.