Young adult fiction in the high school english program works well when it makes teens think, and think deeply about the world and its people. This newly recreated young adult fiction book does just that. Anna has moved to Shanghai in China for a short trip to study at the local art college. She is instantly immersed in Chinese culture and traditions. She meets Chenxi, a local art student who is paid to be her guide during her stay. Anna falls head over heels in love with Chenxi, but is constantly frustrated by his perceptions of her as just a know it all foreigner with no real understanding of China and the people who live there. Although Chenxi grows to respect Anna's skills as an artist, he remains aloof to her attentions.
Anna writes her thoughts and feelings about Chenxi, about Chinese culture and traditions, and her own learning as a young woman into her journal, but unfortunately through the deviousness of the family maid, Chenxi is forced into hiding after Anna writes of his activities in the journal. Chenxi is an artist, but he is passionate about sharing his ideas on art, democracy and censorship and other elements of Chinese culture and traditions with others in an underground network of artists, and it is these activities which lead to his undoing.
After a brief and passionate time shared together one evening, Anna finds herself pregnant and has to suffer the humiliation and trauma of having her pregnancy diagnosed in a Chinese hospital. She decides to keep the baby, and the final scene of the book sees her back in her suburban Melbourne, where she had arrived only a few days before the tragic Tianamen Square massacre. She has never learned what fate befell her beloved Chenxi, but she has kept a note from a friend telling her he is safe but that she should never write again.
