'Each age tries to form its own conception of the past,' historian Frederick Jackson Turner once wrote. That's the task John Pomfret, a former Beijing correspondent for The Washington Post, sets out to achieve for China's modern era.

Pomfret was a student at Nanjing University in the 1980s before being assigned by Associated Press to cover the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989. After being expelled, he was sent back in 1998 by The Washington Post. Those years provided the opportunity to write a coming- of-age story of not only himself but of his classmates trying to reconcile their conceptions of China's past with the tumultuous change of its present.

Pomfret looks up four men and a woman who shared his years at Nanda - the children of China's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution - and lets them tell their own stories of denouncing their parents, destroying their cultural heritage, hiding books in damp cellars, exile to distant work camps, persecution because of class background, and striving for the only thing that mattered: survival.

From his classmates' childhoods to their lives today, Pomfret paints a grim picture of a China that hasn't reconciled its modern history. For centuries, China's intellectual tradition encouraged discussion of what it meant to be a good and virtuous person. 'Fifty-plus years of Communist censorship and political campaigns have silenced those debates, and it is still unclear whether the country has the ability to revive the tradition of asking these timeless questions.' The lack of direction and wanton opportunism left in this moral vacuum, he argues, infects the entire country and will determine whether China can keep its rapid transformation on a steady course. 'The social contract hashed out by Deng [Xiaoping] - you can get rich if you keep your mouth shut - is fraying because too few people have won their share of the bargain.'

We meet a brown-nosing classmate nicknamed 'Big Bluffer' Ye who, almost inevitably, grows up to become a senior Communist Party official in Nanjing. Ye wields power all over Hunan Road, evicting shopkeepers, barring beggars, directing bank loans, restricting traffic and, horrifyingly, covering up the murder of a labourer in police custody. When Pomfret asks Ye whether he agrees with the western ideal that economic development leads to democracy, Ye scoffs: 'So far, it's only made us stronger.'

Another classmate, Zhou, who as a Red Guard teenage torturer had denounced his mother as a 'capitalist', confesses to his frustration at not being able to get in a good blow while beating a family hanging upside down from trees because their bodies kept swinging away. 'How do you think a society where that type of behaviour was condoned, no, not condoned, mandated, can heal itself?' Zhou asks. 'Do you think it ever can?'

The only woman among them is Little Guan. Tortured as a child for her class background, today her arm hangs cocked and limp at her side, the result of a dislocated elbow that healed out of joint because doctors wouldn't treat a class enemy. Pomfret calls it her 'broken wing'. Yet her life story is a moving tale of personal flight, told with a compassion that allows readers to identify with her soaring spirit.

Other Chinese women we meet are girlfriends he calls 'floozies and opportunists', until he finds the woman he eventually marries.

Pomfret at times paints a less-than-flattering portrait of himself, too: as a pot-smoking teenager, the privileged son of a New York executive who could afford to dabble in various metiers; as a young man with the nerve to sleep naked among his Chinese roommates; as a smuggler of Chinese antiquities to raise money for a girlfriend; as a naive reporter who didn't file a story when handed the biggest scoop of his life (the impending crackdown at Tiananmen) and then finds his informant imprisoned for leaking him the news; as someone his future wife called 'arrogant, another one of those know-it-all foreigners who think they understand China better than the Chinese'.

Yet, through his attempts to understand China and through his classmates, Pomfret paints a rich portrait of conflict and change in a country that has gone from Maoist orthodoxy to modern capitalism in their lifetimes.