The Good and the Bad. Or rather, the Bad and the Good. The Bad: the character of Lili is not three dimensional. She comes off apathetic in a manner that is insincere and underdeveloped. I found it all but impossible to relate to her, to sympathize with her, because her character was absolutely unrealistic in an emotional sense. Another bad: Roy. For a man who loves Chinese culture so much, he sure did say a lot of very uneducated and superficial things. It seemed that the author used Roy to portray both the ‘typical’ uneducated Westerner full of biases and the educated and enlightened Westerner. He was yet another cliche like all of the main characters. And, I found it hard to believe that Roy was unable, in the end, to see the full implication of the protests considering he had participated in them in the United States. The Good: the background. Along with Lili’s superficial and uninteresting development (which, in the end, will leave you unsatisfied not because the ending is without resolution, but because Lili remains undeveloped) is the background of a fascinating and diverse China. There are rising stars, bored and angry youngsters, people with caviar dreams, people who idealize the wrong things, peasants who have yet to come to terms with the end of the Cultural Revolution, a ‘backward’ way of life that is no more pure than the corruption of city life… the list goes on and on. The real value of Lili is in this, in this snapshot of diverse, developing, modernizing China, which culminates with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. ( )