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In her reflections on the democracy movement, Lord forsakes the realism of a diplomat for the romanticism of a novelist. "Until Li Peng's announcement of martial law, I had hoped against hope that Deng Xiaoping would walk into the Square; that cupped in his hands would be a peach, the symbol of longevity; that he would proffer it to the hunger strikers, young enough to be his great- grandchildren.' ' With that one dramatic gesture, she argues, "he could have . . . won back the hearts that were once his." But days after she left China, the crackdown came, and Lord began weaving together the voices that so powerfully convey the legacies that the present leadership inherited, and the ones those leaders will bequeath.