
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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- 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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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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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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At the Edge of Empire
- A Family's Reckoning with China
- By: Edward Wong
- Narrated by: Edward Wong, Will Dao
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, Edward Wong grew up among family secrets. His father toiled in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke of his native land or his years in the People’s Liberation Army under Mao. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II and the Communist revolution, when he fell under the spell of Mao’s promise of a powerful China. His astonishing journey as a soldier took him from Manchuria during the Korean War to Xinjiang on the Central Asian frontier.
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Back and Forth
- By Stephen on 05-19-25
By: Edward Wong
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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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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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Brotherless Night
- A Novel
- By: V. V. Ganeshananthan
- Narrated by: Nirmala Rajasingam
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K’s invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority.
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Heartbreaking
- By Aruna V. Sarma on 02-11-23
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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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The Persians
- By: Sanam Mahloudji
- Narrated by: Donia Bijan, Lanna Joffrey, Nikki Massoud, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She lives alone but is sometimes visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, who takes her partying with a side of purpose and yet manages to survive. Elizabeth’s daughters wound up in America: Shirin, a charismatic and flamboyantly high-flying event planner in Houston, who considers herself the family’s future, and Seema, a dreamy idealist turned housewife.
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Beautifully written. A balance of humor and depth.
- By Varsha on 03-28-25
By: Sanam Mahloudji
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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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A thoroughly researched time
- By Caitlyn Harrison on 06-03-25
By: Kate Summerscale
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Good Girl
- A Novel
- By: Aria Aber
- Narrated by: Mozhan Navabi
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist. Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of freedom.
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Rebel, Rebel
- By Suzanna on 02-17-25
By: Aria Aber
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Nesting
- A Novel
- By: Roisín O'Donnell
- Narrated by: Louisa Harland
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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On a bright spring afternoon, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes off the clothesline, she straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe—and that this time, when she leaves, she must stay away. On the surface, she has a perfect life: her husband, Ryan, is a good provider, sometimes even kind and attentive, from a nice Irish family, and they have another baby on the way.
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Jarring narration at times
- By Anonymous User on 04-04-25
By: Roisín O'Donnell
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