Jon L. Saari defines the generation of educated Chinese born around the turn of the century as "the last to have the world of Confucian learning etched into their memories as schoolboys, yet the first as a group to confront the intrusive Western world." The legacies of growing up in a changing environment deeply affected this generation's responses to the further changes in the world they confronted as adults. In the collapse of the Ch'ing dynasty and the chaos of the early twentieth century, traditional ideas of the self, the nature of relationships in society, and ethical behavior had to be reexamined and redefined. To reconstruct what those who lived through and shaped this extraordinary period felt, needed, thought, and became as children and adults, Saari draws on autobiographical writings and his own interviews among the elderly on Taiwan and Hong Kong. He interprets this material within its Chinese context but brings Western sociological, anthropological, and psychological insights to bear on it.
