Word: hsi
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FICTION: Final Payments, Mary Gordon ∙Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, Gabriel Garcia Màrquez ∙Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer ∙The Execution of Mayor Yin, Chen Jo-hsi ∙The Left-Handed Woman, Peter Handke The World According to Garp, John Irving
Final Payments, Mary Gordon ∙Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer ∙ The Execution of Mayor Yin, Chen Jo-hsi ∙The Left-Handed Woman, Peter Handke ∙The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse, edited by Kingsley Amis ∙The World According to Garp, John Irving...
...were silenced. Bookstores carried mainly the sententious classics of Maoism. That great modern political upheaval, the Cultural Revolution, should have provided the raw material for a thousand creative volumes. It produced not a single novel, story, play or opera published in China. Indeed, were it not for Chen Jo-hsi's collection of poignant stories set in the China of the '60s and early '70s, it is very likely that the entire epoch, during which the lives of hundreds of millions of people were profoundly shaken, would never have found its way into contemporary literature...
...Chen Jo-hsi was born on Taiwan in 1938. After several years in the U.S., she emigrated to Communist China. She arrived in 1966 and left, disillusioned, in 1973. While in China, she never wrote a line. But once out, she set to work: all the traumas and hardships and lost hopes of her seven years on the mainland are in these stories of ordinary people...
...Chen Jo-hsi reserves a special scorn for devotees of those I've-been-to-China travelogues that portray a China far more unreal than her fiction. Nixon's Press Corps shows the enforcers of the Communist Party requiring entire neighbor hoods to tear down their makeshift laundry drying racks suspended from people's dwellings so that they will not be eye sores for the foreign visitors. In fact, the visitors never turn up. The lesson here is that often the most difficult struggles come, not in grand political arenas, but in the small and petty matters...