![]() ![]() His days involve hunting for extra food, sexual liaisons, menial subsistence farm work and being publicly abused to foster a sense of community. He is a boy of “average talent, dexterous hands, and a very muddled character”. “A little bit of criticism here and there sharpens one’s moral compass.” So says Wang’s stand-in protagonist Wang Er, who is sent down to rural Yunnan in the late 1960s and begins his story on his 21st birthday. Readers were shocked, outraged, appalled – and have since devoured his work in their millions, just as they have continually asked how it was allowed to be published at all. ![]() Married to the prominent sexologist and LGBTQ+ rights campaigner Li Yinhe, he spent the mid-80s in Pittsburgh as a postgrad student, returning to China as a part-time history professor, and this may explain his writing’s mass appeal – a hip, jaded insider-outsider, far removed from the reverential, government-approved tragic realist school of Cultural Revolution novels (noble parents, infant mortality, sacrificial animal metaphors). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |