The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicated to the written word, and to its wide and free movement. We are asking people to become “Members” the way NPR stations have members – that is, we are asking you to become our partners in making this happen. The new site will continue to be available for free, and its content will be much more easily accessible varied. And, as in the case with public radio, we are offering a premium for your gift (access to our ongoing epub series — with more perks to come).
So dive in, and support us by becoming a member before April 18th and get 10% off. In other words, do the right thing at a discount. For the hundreds of you who have already chipped in and joined up, we thank you!
Today, our Asia editor Jeffrey Wasserstrom selects
three exemplary pieces on China.
Image: Murri via Ralph Magazine
Xujun Eberlein’s “The Teacher of the Future” examines two recent studies of the greatest tragedy of the Mao years, the famine triggered by the Great Leap Forward that began in the late 1950s. Eberlein is a wonderfully versatile author who was born in China, came to the United States to study science, and then shifted gears. She began, like Ha Jin and Yiyun Li before her, to publish fiction in English. She is now a widely read blogger, the author of an acclaimed short story collection, Apologies Forthcoming: Stories Not about Mao, and an essayist who (the subtitle of her first book notwithstanding) has recently been writing powerfully about the first decades of the People’s Republic of China, especially the Cultural Revolution era. Her essay for us toggles between discussion of Mao’s Great Famine, a prize-winning work by a Dutch Sinologist now based in Hong Kong that has provoked a great deal of discussion in the Western press, and the most important recent Chinese language on the same topic to date, Mubie, which will be published in English as Tombstone later this year. The importance of the topic and the acuity of Eberlein’s assessment make this essay one I’m especially glad we were able to include in the LARB.
[click here for article]
The Ladder of Paradise icon described by St. John Climacus
Albert Wu’s “Church and State” looks at Chinese writer-in-exile Liao Yiwu, in particular his most recent book, God is Red. If one goal of the LARB is to offer an appealing venue to writers with substantial résumés, , another is to bring impressive new voices into the mix. Wu, who is finishing up a doctorate in European history at Berkeley and has a strong interest in missionary activities in China, fits into this latter category. Not surprisingly, given his disciplinary background, he places God is Red, a collection of biographical portraits of Chinese Christians living in the People’s Republic of China, into a larger historical framework, emphasizing, unlike the book’s other reviewers, the way Liao’s discussion of Christianity in China fits in with pre-1949 traditions of writing about the topic.
[click here for article]
Last but not least is Alec Ash’s “The Last Rant,” an essay on the controversial artist Ai Weiwei’s posts and tweets. Ash came to my attention via “Six,” the creatively imagined blog he started in Beijing a few years ago, not long after he had graduated from Oxford and moved to China. “Six” explored the life experiences of a sextet of Ash’s Chinese classmates, members of a generation that, he argues convincingly, often gets short shrift in Western reporting and commentary on China. Its members often end up being misunderstood, ignored, or treated as less heterogeneous in their views than is actually the case. “The Last Rant,” which was written after Ash suspended his blog and moved back to the U.K. (he’s soon to return to China and, I hope, to resume “Six”), shows why he’s begun to attract attention as a freelance writer, with work appearing in venues such as the Financial Times and Prospect.
Ash’s piece also has a renewed topicality, in the light of recent headlines about Ai, who, in the latest twist in his already complex life story, has been prohibited by the government from documenting his own movements through the use of surveillance cameras he had put up in various places he routinely spends time.
The Asia Section of the Los Angeles Review of Books, which I am delighted to be editing, is, like the publication as a whole, a work in progress. So far, it has tended to focus on just one part of the continent (the part, not coincidentally, that I focus on myself: China). Soon, however, the section’s China-centrism will be tempered as other countries get more attention. Essays in preparation include a piece by Maura Cunningham on new nonfiction about India; first-time contributor Julia Thomas’s assessment of Ian Hideo-Levy’s A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard, set in 1960s Japan; and my own examination of the way that various Asian cities, especially Singapore and Tokyo, have come to shape global dreams and nightmares about things to come. In short, in the future, to play on a famous line by William Gibson that figures centrally in the essay I’m writing for LARB 2.0, the Asia section has already arrived, but in the future it will be less unevenly distributed.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the Asia editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and a professor at the University of California at Irvine.
