100 Books Like Behind the Wall

I think of myself as an adventurous traveler, but Dervla Murphy travels in a way that I would never even consider.

So, it’s a pleasure to sit in a comfortable chair and read about places I’ll never visit and people who I’d love to meet, but never will. Murphy writes so vividly I feel as though I am right beside her as she fends off wolves, struggles to drag a bicycle uphill through mountain snow, and shares tea with nomads.

This was her first book and every book that follows is equally compelling.

This journey is simultaneously a descent into fear and chaos and an ascent into manhood. An excitable young man on his first solo journey deliberately throwing himself way out of his depth in the Orinoco basin. Allen’s aim to learn how to survive in the jungle from the indigenous peoples who’ve thrived there for centuries is a pattern he came to repeat throughout his career and one that many explorers should learn from. Things take a turn when he overhears a plot on his life and he makes a solo one-month escape from the jungle with only the clothes on his back.

Even among this indomitable breed of women, Mary stands out for her daring. She came to Africa almost a century after Anne Barnard with a keen interest in natural history and the eye of an early anthropologist while traveling in places synonymous with dangerous disease – from Sierra Leone to Angola, Congo, and Niger.

She was barely less bold as a standard bearer for African culture, challenging perceptions about the colonial mission before dying as nobly as she had lived, nursing Boer prisoners of war at the Cape in 1900.

Throwim Way Leg is an otherworldly account of a country I’ve come to know well in recent years. Biologist Tim Flannery travelled far and wide in this land of mountains and jungle throughout the 80s, when ancient and unsavoury practices were still widespread, or at least existed in very recent memory. The book is a hilarious, non-judgemental, and open-minded account of New Guinean tribal life. Everything from cannibalism to courtship is related alongside a fascinating look at the mammalian life inhabiting some of the world’s deepest recesses of jungle.

Get this book first for the extraordinary collection of 300 black-and-white photographs of the Cultural Revolution in Lhasa, which is also one of the largest troves of Cultural Revolution-era photographs from anywhere in China. The remarkable photos, which depict the destruction of temples, the humiliation of lamas and members of the old nobility, and more, were taken by Tsering Dorje, a Tibetan officer in the People’s Liberation Army. 

Then read the accompanying essays and interviews by Tsering Dorje’s daughter, the prominent Tibetan poet, writer, and public intellectual Tsering Woeser, which not only chronicle the events of the Cultural Revolution but meditate on Tibetan participation in the assaults on Tibet’s cultural heritage and, like the two books above, serve as powerful reminders of the ways communal memory continues to hamper state efforts to fully integrate Tibetans and other non-Han communities into the Chinese nation.

Tsering Döndrup, known for his cuttingly satirical, frequently unflattering, and often hilarious critiques of Tibetan and Chinese society, is one of the most celebrated writers of fiction in contemporary Tibet. And this is certainly his most audacious and courageous novel. 

Based on extensive interviews and archival sources, The Red Wind Howls essentially begins where Naktsang’s memoir ends: the 1958 Amdo Rebellion and its brutal pacification by the Chinese state. Although moving seamlessly between the protagonist’s childhood, the Cultural Revolution, and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform era, much of the story takes place in the labor camps where tens of thousands of Amdo Tibetans were sent in the aftermath of the 1958 rebellion.

Yet Dhöndrup tells this story with his characteristic iconoclasm and dark humor that frequently had me laughing in spite of the seriousness of the subject matter.

The godmother – the empress dowager, if you will – of all naughty Chinese authoresses is the inimitable Anchee Min. Her debut memoir, Red Azalea, was published half-a-decade before Shanghai Baby, and takes place half-a-century prior, at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. The first half of her story is set in a countryside labor camp, where teenaged Min and another young woman carry out a secret affair, with regrettable consequences. The second half of Min’s memoir finds her returning to her native Shanghai, now as the star of a movie production about Madam Mao, while carrying out yet another forbidden relationship, with one of Mao’s advisers. Min published seven subsequent books, all to critical acclaim, but Red Azalea is her at her most fearless.

Stories can be sticky. They attach memories to places. I first visited San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early nineties. There were no mobile phones then or digital maps, so I wandered the streets and browsed the stores, admiring the green-tiled roofs and bright red lanterns, imagining I was back in Beijing. Growing hungry, I entered the first restaurant I saw. I sat, ordered, and pulled a paperback out of my coat pocket as I waited for my homestyle tofu to arrive. Diners ate. Waiters cleared plates. People picked up their takeaways. And I read. 

A few minutes later, the waiter returned. “You,” he said, “have a phone call.” He pointed at the desk beside the door. The restaurant’s phone handset was off the cradle and lay on the counter. “That’s impossible,” I thought. No one knew where I was. I didn’t know where I was. But there was the phone,… show more.

I was fortunate to have met Da Chen when he was keynote speaker for our high school’s annual teen writer’s conference. I had read and recommended to my AP World History students his riveting Colors of the Mountain. 

He was warm with students and staff, regaling my class with stories of life in post-Mao China. Da Chen’s interest in people is evident in his engaging Colors of the Mountain. A tale of triumph against all odds, Da Chen’s memoir chronicles how he and his family survived China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

Despite the harshness of the times, Da Chen tells his story with uncommon grace and humor. I return to his work time and again, not just for preparation in teaching 20th-century China, but also for personal inspiration.

This instant classic was the first to draw deeply on a wide range of previously inaccessible sources about the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976. Highly readable and authoritative, it provides extensive insight into Mao’s actions and those of his subordinates and victims and documents the destructive impact of these conflicts all across China from the initial salvos at Peking University in May 1966 to the immediate aftermath of Mao’s death, which led to the arrest of Mao’s most ardent radical followers, the “Gang of Four”.