During the Cultural Revolution, children killed parents, lives were broken irrevocably, millions were beaten and starved to death – and Wang Xiaobo wrote an erotic comic novel about it all. Now one of China’s most popular modern writers, Wang was completely unknown when he released Golden Age in Taiwan in 1992; now it is available for the first time in complete form in a sparky, earthy translation by the young Chinese American translator Yan Yan. Wang wrote prolifically, torrentially, for the next five years, scandalising the authorities and titillating the…
Tag: Books
Golden Age by Wang Xiaobo review – revolution in the bed
Golden Age is a Chinese bestseller by cult writer Wang Xiaobo that now appears in a new translation and charts the story of Wang’s work and sex life, beginning with the Cultural Revolution. The novel opens with a 21-year-old Wang working in a remote commune and starting an affair with the 26-year-old “old shoe” Chen Qingyang. What follows is some of the funniest writing on sex I have encountered, written in the form of “confessions” to the Communist party. Wang’s tone is that of an “intellectual youth” turned peasant diligently…
Runner-up: Observer/Anthony Burgess prize for arts journalism 2023 – Luke Hallam on Perhat Tursun’s The Backstreets
Luke Hallam is a writer and editor based in Cambridge. He is a senior editor at Persuasion, an online magazine of ideas and current affairs Perhat Tursun, a controversial and highly acclaimed Uyghur writer, vanished in 2018. He is reportedly enduring a 16-year sentence in a Chinese prison, just one of the many victims of the Communist party’s genocidal campaign against Uyghurs. We don’t know the crime he is accused of, nor the conditions in which he is being kept. Sadly, these circumstances are not unusual: an estimated 1 million…
Karen Clarke obituary
My wife, Karen Clarke, who has died of cancer aged 60, was a special needs teacher who improved the lives of scores of marginalised young people in south London. Her lessons, influenced by her earlier life as an archaeologist, translator, marketing consultant and cookery book author, were inspirational; and it was this work, and her output as a writer, that gave her a true feeling that she had made a positive and lasting contribution. Karen was born in Fareham, Hampshire. Her parents had met in Hong Kong; her father, Basil…
China’s censored feminist movement finds solace in Sally Rooney
When the manuscript of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends first arrived in Peng Lun’s inbox, he hesitated. It was 2017, and Peng – who had worked in publishing for a little over a decade – had just started his own house in Shanghai, Archipel Press. He had heard about the clamour from publishers that resulted in a heated auction for the rights to the young Irish author’s first novel and thought it might be worth having it translated into simplified Chinese. He decided to commission readers’ reports from two women.…
Red Memory review – the Cultural Revolution up close
In the 1990s, something odd happened in Beijing’s burgeoning fine dining scene. Among the chic eateries, restaurants emerged with very simple dishes: meat and vegetables cooked in plain style with few frills. The diners were not there just for the cuisine, but to relive the experience of a period generally considered a disaster: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The plain dishes were meant to invoke a time of restrained, austere living, when people thought of the collective rather than the individual. Only the sky-high prices reminded diners that they were…
Hong Kong police arrest six for selling ‘seditious’ book at lunar new year fair
Police in Hong Kong have raided a lunar new year shopping fair and arrested six people for selling a “seditious” book related to the 2019 anti-government protests in a move critics say has spread “terror” just days before the celebrations. National security officers accused three men and three women, aged between 18 and 62, of producing and publishing “a seditious book about a series of riots that occurred in Hong Kong from June 2019 to February 2020”, and selling it in a lunar new year stall in a shopping centre…
Winnie the Pooh joins Chinese Covid lockdown protests
Years after he became character non grata in China, Winnie the Pooh is exacting quiet revenge against the country’s government in the form of Disney souvenirs. In what appears to be a case of incidental resistance, Disney stores in Japan are selling a line of merchandise featuring a frowning Pooh looking at a blank sheet of white paper – a symbol of ongoing protests in China against censorship and Covid-19 restrictions. The range, designed by the Japanese illustrator Kanahei, shows the image – taken from a scene in a 2011…
Babel: the BookTok sensation that melds dark academia with a post-colonial critique
A boy lies still beside the body of his mother. Her skin is blue and her eyes are open, wet and glassy. It is 1828, and a cholera epidemic has swept through Canton, China. The boy is the only one left alive in the house and is on the brink of death when a quiet white Englishman brings him to London. There, the young Chinese boy is named Robert Swift and grows up in solitude, trained in English, Latin, ancient Greek and Chinese. For what reason, he does not yet…
‘Tragically ugly’ school textbook causes social media outcry in China
China’s education ministry has ordered a state-owned publisher to rectify a school textbook that went viral owing to what social media users described as “tragically ugly” and inappropriate depictions of children. The mathematics books published by the People’s Education Press contain illustrations of people with distorted faces and bulging pants. Boys are seen grabbing girls’ skirts and one child appears to have a leg tattoo. The books are reportedly used in elementary schools across the country, from Shandong province in the north-east to Yunnan in the south. Photos of the…