The rule of the Kuomintang, the Japanese invasion, socialist transformations, the “cultural revolution”, the reforms of Deng Xiaoping - the heroes of Ilya Falkovsky’s book, who went through the millstones of history and managed to survive, tell about these and other events. All of them are former and current Russian professors who presented Russian classics to the Chinese reader and compiled Russian language dictionaries. Despite the years of ban on studying the Russian language in the PRC, they carried their love for it throughout their lives. The author alternates stories of old Chinese intellectuals with notes about his own existence in China and about attempts to penetrate into a foreign culture, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always informative .