Before the counter-culture revolutionary Li Lian was executed in 1971 for criticising the Cultural Revolution, pour policemen pushed her face against the window of a truck, lifted her shirt and cut out her kidneys with a surgical knife,’ Mau Sen sa...
Before the sparrow arrived, you had almost stopped thinking about flight. Then, last winter, it soared through the sky and landed in front of you, or more precisely on the windowsill of the covered balcony adjoining your bedroom. You knew the grimy w...
Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.
I am trying to persuade my family to spend more time in China. It's no fun to be in exile. I can't even figure out the basic 26 letters, let alone operate, in English. I often feel that although I've found the sky of freedom above my head, I've lost ...
In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.
Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.
Living in London is like being on a luxury cruise liner.
I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.
In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far ha...
Beijing Coma took me 10 years to finish.
Only when you are aware of the uniqueness of everyone's individual body will you begin to have a sense of your own self-worth.
The Beijing Olympics represent China's grand entrance onto the world stage and confirmation of its new superpower status.
The Chinese people have been forced to forget the Tiananmen massacre. There has been no public debate about the event, no official apology. The media aren't allowed to mention it. Still today people are being persecuted and imprisoned for disseminati...
I am completely in favour of dialogue and engagement. But it must be a true, open dialogue.
When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.
I am a writer. Being critical is a writer's responsibility.
Tyrannies not only want to control your mind and thoughts but your flesh as well.
It is vitally important for me, both personally and for my writing, to be able to return to China freely, so being barred entry has caused me deep concern and distress.
When people are poor, they find ways of making things taste like fish.
I have to live within my memories, within my private universe, and continually return to China, the land where my thoughts are locked. This is a very painful kind of existence, this feeling of nowhereness.
