Baptism
About
Beijing, early 1950s. A group of intellectuals at a literary institute navigate the new revolutionary reality with the tools they know best: gossip, intrigue, back-stabbing, and the occasional love affair. The old social hierarchies haven't disappeared — they've just put on different clothes. Then the first great political purge arrives, and everyone must undergo public confession. What they reveal about their souls has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with fear. Yang Jiang — playwright, essayist, translator, and one of twentieth-century China's sharpest minds — wrote her only novel with the wit of a satirist and the precision of someone who watched an entire intellectual class learn to betray itself. Baptism is a comedy of manners that ends in terror — the moment when performance becomes the only form of survival.
