The Sky Dwellers describes the lives and struggles of primary school teachers in Jieling, a tiny, fictional community nestled high in remote mountains in China. These teachers are not state teachers, with regular salaries and pensions to look forward to. They are, instead, community teachers or minban teachers a term which literally translates as people-supported teachers whose wages are paid by the local community and who might not have received much beyond primary school teaching themselves. During the 1960s, 70s and 80s, most children in China were taught by minban teachers. From the early 1990s onwards, the role was gradually phased out, and some minban teachers were lucky enough to become state teachers.
A minban teachers life was one of poverty. State subsidies provided only part of their wages and local cadres were supposed to make up the rest from often very limited village funds. But often the cadres did not pay on time, or at all. Inevitably, this would result in tensions a theme explored in this novel.
Each of the teachers in the book responds differently to the pressures of life as a minban teacher. But the novel is not just about the teachers lives, it also deals with the impact they had on the children and the community they served. Set in the 1990s, a time of great social and cultural change in China, The Sky Dwellers is a compelling, personal and moving account of a part of Chinas recent past which is often overlooked.
關於作者：
刘醒龙，生于古城黄州，现为《芳草》文学杂志总编，华中师范大学客座教授，华中师范大学刘醒龙当代文学研究中心名誉主任。著有《刘醒龙文集》（27卷）等。散文《抱着父亲回故乡》获老舍散文奖，中篇小说《挑担茶叶上北京》获首届鲁迅文学奖，长篇小说《天行者》获第八届茅盾文学奖。
Born in 1956 in Tuanfeng in Hubei province, Liu Xinglongsworks include eleven novels and twelve collectionsof short stories. Some of his novels have been translatedand published in English, French, Japanese and Korean.His novel The Sky Dwellers won the 8th Mao Dun LiteraturePrize, while his Holy Heavens Gate won the first Academyof Contemporary Chinese Literature Prize and the secondChina Novel Society Novel Prize. He has also won the LuXun Literature Prize for a novella and Taiwans UnitedLiterature Prize.
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