Grass Soup

by Martha Avery (Translator), Hsien-Liang Chang (Author), Zhang Xianliang (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $4.27

  Now one of China's major literary figures, Zhang Xianling spent twenty-two years of his life in Mao's labour reform camps. In 1960, two years into his imprisonment, he began to keep a diary, the sole tangible record of his existence. Grass Soup deciphers the cryptic entries in that remarkable document, miraculously presevred from destruction and returned to its author in 1979.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $3.46

  Rehabilitated in 1979, former political prisoner Zhang Xianliang recovered from the authorities a diary he had kept while in a labour camp during the 1960s. This book is a detailed annotation to the necessarily terse entries in that diary, and describes the frightening process by which a major civilization can destroy its own humanity by mass complicity, yet at the same time shows how small gestures and acts of kindness can keep hope alive.