Volume 29, Number 2 · February 18, 1982
Up Against the Great Wall
By Frederic Wakeman
The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980
by Jonathan D. Spence
Viking, 465 pp., $19.95
Returning to China this September, I happened to meet the translator Hsu Kai-yu in the San Francisco airport seeing off a delegation of Chinese authors who had been attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Professor Hsu introduced me to Xiao Jun, whose 1934 novel Village in August had so powerfully depicted the communist guerrillas' resistance against the Japanese army in northeastern China. Xiao, a heavy-set man with expressionless eyes and white hair in a crew cut, looked exhausted after a whirlwind tour of the East Coast. Nevertheless, while we chatted, I saw through the veil of his fatigue flashes of the brash young dissident who had been 'sent down' to perform heavy labor in the coal mines of southern Manchuria after so boldly criticizing the Chinese Communist Party in 1947.
Review, 4753 words
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