The most repugnant deception is the fairy-tale time and place. The narrator tells us that his parents met "40 years ago." Yet in the late 1950s, the entire country was wracked by a Mao-induced famine that killed up to 30 million people. Emaciated or bloated from dropsy, the villagers would be scrounging for grass, weeds and bark. And this isn't a fertile, rice-growing area. It appears to be low, thinly-forested hills--the sort of area where the half-dead fed on human flesh. If we push the time up to 1960, there still wouldn't be such abundance ...