Wang agrees, partly sincerely – life during the Cultural Revolution may be “a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed”, but it’s his Golden Age, better than the stultifying, unsurely liberalising, globalising world he haunts in the latter part of the novel. 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).
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