As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been waiting since I first began studying this elusive country six decades ago. What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it traces China’s tumultuous recent history through the eyes of its most renowned 20th-century poet, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Weiwei, now equally renowned in the global art world. It guides us from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist era in the 1930s, through Mao Zedong’s revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, and on to the “reform era” of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and Xi Jinping’s current Leninist restoration, explaining how, as Ai Weiwei writes, “the whirlpool that swallowed up my father upended my life too, leaving a mark on me that I carry to this day.”