Da Chen's recent two books: Colors of the Mountain (2001) and Sounds of the River: A Memoir (2002) were favorably reviewed. The Chicago Tribune interviewed him and released answers and questions on March 31. In Colors of the Mountain, Da Chen describes his youth in mainland China with engaging humor and affecting warmth. Wendy Smith wrote that born in 1962, Chen was the grandson of a landlord, which rendered his entire family pariahs during the Cultural Revolution. Though initially an excellent student, he was ostracized in school and told he could never attend college. He responded by making friends with a group of young thugs who drank, smoked, and gambled but were kind to him. After Mao died in 1976, the budding juvenile delinquent discovered that higher education might be available to him after all. Chen worked hard to make up for years of neglected studies, and his memoir closes with a jubilant scene as he and his brother Jin are both accepted into college; for his suffering family, "thirty years of humiliation had suddenly come to an end." (Wendy Smith, Amazon.com)
The second book, Sounds of the River, begins where the first book left off. Coming from the small town of Yellow Stone in the southern province of Fujian, 16-year-old Chen moves to early 1980s Beijing to study English at the university. Chen delicately weaves his own personal story of maturation into that of the slow shaking off of the Cultural Revolution; he still faces potentially serious difficulties when he uses Sidney Sheldon along with Shakespeare to teach his students English, or meets a psychoanalyst and a musician who are secretly Christian missionaries, are just two examples. But Chen states from the outset that the point of his studies was to get him to the U.S. (Publishers Weekly)
Wen Huang remarked on the book: "... by sharing his story, Chen offers Western readers a poignant picture of life in modern China and helps enrich their knowledge about immigrants who have lived in other cultures and under difference political systems, as well as the ambitions that have driven them." (Chicago Tribune, March 31, 2002).
Da Chen lives in New York.