In "Change", Mo Yan - China's foremost novelist - personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in a novella disguised as autobiography (or vice versa). Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, Change is a representative of 'people's history', a bottom-up rather than top-down view of a country in flux. By moving back and forth in time and focusing on small events and everyday people, Yan breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen.