Hand-Grenade Practice In Peking. My Part in the Cultural Revolution. Slightly Foxed editions, No.14. Limited edition 476/2000. by WOOD, FRANCES:

Slightly Foxed Editions. 2011 1st thus.. 7.0 x 4.5 inches. In yellow cloth covers with gilt to spine and blind embossed logo to front. Red endpapers. In very good condition. Spine slightly faded. Else a very clean and tight copy. 237 pp. With b/w line drawings in text. “I see Frances Wood in that great tradition of intrepid British women explorers, like Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Bell. She sets out for China in 1975, when the Cultural Revolution is still going strong, and soon she is hacking a path through impenetrable jungles of revolutionary doctrine and jargon. Now she is gamely slogging across arid deserts of boredom and hours of improving lectures about the heroic deeds and shining examples of simple peasants. There are a hundred discomforts and irritations to be endured. To the natives she is a figure of curiosity; they stare and point and they don’t accept her. Like her explorer predecessors, she is indomitable, but in her case it is because of her heroic sense of humour and her eye for the absurd. Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking – her account of the year she spent as a student first at the Foreign Languages Institute in Peking and then at Peking University – is a very funny book. China in 1975 was, after all, a sort of undiscovered country, the strangest of strange foreign lands, half-mad from the Cultural Revolution. Intellectuals were being persecuted, universities were stamping out ‘ivory-towerism’ and from trees, buildings and street lights the tannoys bellowed propaganda. Terrible cruelties were inflicted at that time, which she learned about only when she returned to London. In the meantime the young Frances Wood, just down from Cambridge where she studied Chinese, was determined to improve her speaking of the language and to amuse herself and be amused by what she found. So the battle lines were drawn: the Chinese Cultural Revolution versus the English Joke. Hers is that peculiarly English sense of humour which is based on the deflating of pomposity. In Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking, the pin is being jabbed into ideological grandiosity.” From foxedquarterly.com