Word: gao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...woman's name was a frosty interlude amid the pleasantries of George W. Bush's meeting with China's Vice Premier Qian Qichen. The woman is Gao Zhan, 40, a sociologist at American University in Washington who has been held by Chinese authorities since mid-February. Bush bluntly told Qian of his "extreme concern" about Gao. He was echoing similar statements by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who called the case "particularly outrageous...
...Gao's ordeal began as she, her son Andrew, 5, and her husband Xue Donghua approached the Northwest Airlines counter at Beijing airport on Feb. 11 to return from a three-week vacation. Suddenly, some 15 plainclothes security agents appeared and separated the family. "We didn't even have a chance to look at each other," says Xue. The agents blindfolded Xue and drove him to a house where they interrogated him for 26 days. On March 8 they took him to Andrew, who, because of the abrupt and prolonged break, did not recognize him at first. "He was looking...
...chorus of concern grew louder when the first Chinese Nobel laureate in literature, exiled author Gao Xingjian (whose works are banned in the mainland) visited Hong Kong three weeks ago. Instead of being feted, he was pointedly ignored by officials...
Reading Soul Mountain in this version is a frustrating experience, chiefly because of the sense that there must be more to it than this. Surely the Nobel Prize cannot have been decided principally on the basis of what appears here. Gao, 60, a playwright as well as a novelist, is regarded as a master of the Chinese language. Perhaps that skill cannot be completely conveyed in a translation, but a better use of English might have helped...
When it announced in October that Gao Xingjian had become the first Chinese author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy singled out for particular praise his "great novel" Soul Mountain, calling it "one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves." Proving that fate sometimes smiles on publishers, an English rendition of Soul Mountain (HarperCollins; 510 pages; $27) was in the works well before the Nobel hullabaloo made its author an international celebrity, and has now arrived with the unexpected imprimatur of the Swedish Academy...