Word: gao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...daughter of Chief Justice William Rehnquist--whose Supreme Court ensured there would be a second President Bush. No surprise that 16 months ago, she got a job as inspector general at the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department. But her connections may be wearing thin. The General Accounting Office (GAO) began an investigation in October into charges that she has mismanaged the office. Among the allegations: that she forced out a number of senior career staff members, improperly kept a gun in her office and ran up questionable travel bills. She is also under fire for delaying an audit...
...With its complex blend of genres, the play is risky. But Gao's equanimity runs deep. Friends speak of his Zen-like detachment, what his French translator Noel Dutrait calls his "unshakable faith" in himself. "He can be in the center, yet not of the center," observes one of his English translators, Prof. Gilbert Fong. "This is what he tries to capture in his writing." For Gao, detachment is just another word for freedom, the freedom to live and to write what he described in his Nobel acceptance speech as "cold literature," art that "refuses to be strangled by society...
...dated girls, but a lot of them would report to the higher-ranking officials and tell them exactly what I was thinking," he recalls. "And I had funny thoughts." Later, during the Cultural Revolution, he was even denounced as a counterrevolutionary by his first wife. As a young man, Gao wrote down his funny thoughts in fistfuls of plays and novels, but with the Red Guards attacking the least twitch of non-conformity, he burned all of his early writing as a precaution. This sacrifice didn't save him from being exiled to the countryside for "reeducation." Despite the hardship...
...Gao's experience during the Cultural Revolution, which he details in his second and most recent novel One Man's Bible, was not unique; it was merely horrible. "His language was raped," says Malmqvist. "For Gao Xingjian, to have his language raped is to be raped himself." He vowed that it would never happen again. When Chinese authorities threatened him for writing non-conformist literature in 1983, Gao was forced to choose between self-censorship and exile. "Exile meant survival to me," he says, "physical survival as well as maintaining spiritual independence, by gaining freedom of expression...
...Today Gao is adjusting to what he calls his "second exile," his escape from Nobel celebrity. After Taipei, he will retool Snow in August for a production in Marseilles, where 2003 has been declared the Year of Gao Xingjian. Regardless of plaudits, prizes and criticism, Gao will no doubt continue along his solitary, unflinching path. "I think he has an interior mission," says translator Dutrait. "He's determined to go all the way to the end, the end of his dreams of total art, of cinema, painting, novels, theater, everything. And he must go faster. He sees the time passing...