Helen Brown discusses the Western enjoyment of China’s “forbidden literary fruit,” with references to yellow books and blue books, Ezra Pound, “cold literature,” and the lack of domestic crime thrillers. From Telegraph newspaper online:
Fifteen years ago, a big green book emerged from a country better known for a little red one.
Jung Chang‘s family memoir Wild Swans told the heartbreaking story of three generations of women in China: the warlord’s concubine, the betrayed revolutionary and the reluctant Red Guard who became a writer.
Selling more than 10 million copies and topping the “most borrowed historical biography” chart in British libraries year after year, it proved a publishing phenomenon and a triumph for an author who, at the age of 16, had flushed her first poem down the loo for fear her father’s tormentors should find it. [Full Text]
