TRANSLATED BY YAN YAN
These pugnacious, blackly funny and insightful essays, from one of China’s most subversive and popular writers, show the liberating power of words. Here Wang Xiaobo ranges over, among other things, talking and silence in the Cultural Revolution, the irrepressible spirit of a pig he met while working in a commune, beloved writers from Bertrand Russell to Italo Calvino, the culture shock of American food, and being operated on via a textbook. First published in the 1990s, these razor-sharp works give a glimpse into a world rarely seen – and rarely discussed with such honesty.