Books: Rediscovering Peking Man

"WATCH OUT FOR THE FOREIGN GUESTS!" CHINA ENCOUNTERS THE WEST by Orville Schell; Pantheon; 178 pages; $8.95

To find the Peace Café turn right at the Four Unities Hair Salon, pass the East Wind Movie Theater and head down Goldfish Alley. Before it was shuttered in the late 1970s, the café attracted some of Peking's most stylish youth, like New Nation Li, "attired in silken shirt and a well-tailored, gray Western suit with tight-fitting bell-bottom pants and pointed black shoes." Or Benefit-the-People Wang, by day a soldier in the People's Liberation Army, by night an exponent of the funky layered look. "From...

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