Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today's China

Rating:
Summary: A Good Collection of Stories and Authors
Review: A read the stories in this book as part of my training before a month long journey to China.

This is a very interesting book if you are interested in views of modern China. If you are not into Chinese culture, you will probably not find these stories interesting.

The translation is good and easy to follow. The story shows many different points of view regarding life in China today.

So again, if you like Chinese culture you will really enjoy these short stories.

Rating:
Summary: Eerie, funny, fascinating.
Review: I picked this up because I'm going to China next month. This isn't a tour book, but it has gotten me excited about seeing the people and the place. It's almost like science fiction without the science -- stories from an alien culture.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Fiction With Political Edge
Review: Ongoing censorship in China regularly brings news of the arrest of dissident journalists, writers and poets. Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused grew out of the literary community's discontent with this censorship.

For people who live in countries that don't have severe restrictions on what can and can't be published, it may be hard to understand what is so controversial about the stories in this book. Admittedly, not all of these works are controversial; some are downright funny. It is many of the authors themselves who are controversial:

Mo Yan - author of Red Sorghum, taught in a cultural unit of the People's Liberation Army in Beijing.

Su Tong - author of Raise the Red Lantern, a shocking depiction of the oppression of women in China.

Wang Meng - served as Minister of Culture; was dismissed after the June Fourth Movement in 1989.

Some of the stories -- Footsteps on the Roof, First Person, and Green Earth Mother -- have an almost Gothic feel to them. Others, like The Past and the Punishments, and The Day I Got To Xi'an, have a more surreal quality. Still others portray lives of common villiagers. A String of Choices is of particular note in that it is an absolutely hilarious description of a man with a toothache who is presented with an overwhelming number of medical alternatives just to avoid the Government dental clinic's routine solution -- yank it, with no anesthetic.

Whether you read this book to support universal human rights to freedom of speech, or read it to experience the diversity of literary styles that have emerged from modern Chinese writers, the important thing to remember is, either way, you will not be disappointed.