Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors. A Novel.

Chia Pao-yu is alive and well! The Beijing University pro-democracy activist is living in exile under an assumed name, Jean Valjaur (JV). As was rumored in the prequel, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors, Chia was not executed for helping to organize the April-June 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Now in Paris, he witnessed the Bataclan terrorist attacks, the Yellow Vest protests, and survived the COVID-19 (or Horseshoe Bat) pandemic¿after having survived the AIDS pandemic in China in the 1980s. He pursues his self-study of Asian influence on western culture with a focus on Pop artists and Beat poets. He likewise critiques the views of western ¿Maoists,¿ like Mylex H. Galvin¿whom Chia depicts as a ¿Wokeist¿ before his time. During the pandemic lockdown, Chia reflects on the reasons why he became a pro-democracy, pro-environment and anti-nuclear dissident. In Paris, Chia finds work with the Foundation for Human Values Forever (HVF), directed by the charismatic feminist Bereft LaPlante. He meets dissidents like himself who have suffered for their political views and gender. Now as a French citizen, Chia participates in Hong Kong protests, and takes part in a conference on the "Future of China" in Washington, DC. There, he witnesses President Trump¿s threat to call in US G.I. Joes to repress protests in June 2020¿that recalls the June 1989 Tiananmen Square repression by the Chinese Army (PLA). Back in Paris, he accidentally learns that the HVF Foundation finances questionable activities not related to humanitarian causes¿and quits after a drunken LaPlante attempts to assault him sexually. The secretive Society for the Exploration of Cosmic Consciousness (SECC) publishes his ¿Planetary Manifestö: If the U.S. Balding Eagle, the Chinese Red Dragon, the Russian Double-Headed Eagle cannot soon resolve their differences, then the popular hopes of ¿Barbies¿ and ¿Kens¿ for global peace will be crushed by the boots of ¿G.I. Joe.¿ Just after starting work for the SECC, Chia mysteriously disappears in a suspected trade-off for a Western spy held by Beijing¿at least that is the ¿official¿ news story.

The whole Communist world is in the middle of a democratic revolution. Hall Gardner's novel depicts the protests taking place prior to the June 1989 Tiananmen Square repression-a subject still taboo in China. Hired to teach English, Mylex H. Galvin records his experience in his "Anti-Marco Polo" journal after he meets expats from around the world, while trying to come to grips with the Chinese language, history, and politics. Galvin becomes disillusioned with the poverty and environmental destruction that he finds in China; his barefoot doctor heroes are not capable of treating AIDS; Chinese and African students clash in Nanjing-with no sense of international solidarity. As the democracy movement heats up, he is torn between the love of Tao Baiqing, a Daoist, and Mo Li, a student of English Lit, and unwittingly betrays the ties between the journalist, Hayford, and the democracy activist, Chia Pao-yu-accused of leaking "top secrets" to Hayford. As Galvin studies China's relations with the Western world since Marco Polo, with emphasis on the "hundred years of humiliation," he becomes haunted by nightmares of a "clash of civilizations" and warns against a coming Apocalyptic Color War between the Balding Eagle and the Chinese Dragon-as the latter transmogrifies from Red into shades of Red-Brown-Black.