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Ready, Get Self, Go!China's younger generation discovers the identity crisis.

By Ann HulbertUpdated Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008, at 7:03 AM ET

Also in Slate, Andrew Nathan reviews The Man on Mao's Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China's Foreign Ministry, Minxin Pei reviews Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, and Nicholas Day takes on Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China.

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Yet, if a lonely emptiness haunts the dislocated women and the motherless boy, so does a restless ambition and spirit of resilience. Guo's narrators have a striking tenacity, hardly the navel-focused and commitment-averse style typically associated with Western self-seeking. Z gets frustrated with her British boyfriend, 20 years older than she and worn down by a defiant independence that has brought him scant happiness. He retreats from real intimacy and undermines his own talents, merely dabbling in sculpture and driving an old delivery van. For her, as for Fenfang, individualism and self-expression are mysteries that demand mastery, and they're impatient, as Fenfang puts it, "to forge my self-centered individualist life into some kind of healthy activity," whatever it takes. They've been raised to work hard, and, like their author—who has already written four novels and made five films—they don't waste time, buffeted though they feel by urban chaos and private confusion. They're determined to see for themselves, better late than never, whether " 'self' is the original creativity for everything," as Z exclaims in a giddy moment.

And where another boy might have been crushed by such a brutal father, and derailed as an artist by the urge to defy him, Lang Lang emerges a spiky-haired dynamo eager to put his own passionate mark on the music he plays—overeager, in fact, as critics began to say when the early raves for the prodigy faded. The teen version of his memoir (Playing With Flying Keys), packaged with a brief introduction by Daniel Barenboim about the deep pleasure that good practicing can bring, gives the odyssey a didactic spin: Lang Lang's convalescence while an injured hand heals also helps cure a fragile and unexamined self. With the help of American friends and mentors, he has discovered a balanced soul within, he says, and has been liberated to explore other dimensions of life as well as the inner depths of music.

The adult version (Journey of a Thousand Miles), which is rawer and more direct—more youthful—from the start, betrays more of Lang Lang's struggle to moderate an obsessive-compulsive dependence on the piano and temper a desperate need to win. Entering his 20s, his injury forces him finally to pause, and he discovers that he "didn't have to practice ten hours a day to stay sane. … Was I ever really a normal teenager? Maybe not, but I also wasn't crazy. The piano is a beautiful thing, but during that month I learned that it isn't the only beautiful thing." To a Western reader, though, the most amazing feat is his apparent ability to soar above his rage at a man who has heartlessly tyrannized him. Lang Lang discovers his inner child and finds he can be his own boss, and his father's, too.

This unshackled young self takes charge with manic gumption, but also with grace. At his Carnegie Hall solo debut at 21 in 2003, he invites his father up on stage for one of his encores. It's a duet for piano and erhu, the Chinese fiddle Lang Guoren plays expertly, and Lang Lang makes a point of noting that he has changed the original name of the piece, "Competing Horses" or "Horse Race," to "Two Horses." With that deft gesture, he conveys deference and at the same time claims his independence. Watch this video of the galloping pair, and it is obvious this son has no doubt now about who is leading the way.