Chen Qingyang News Today

This bawdy, irreverent Cultural Revolution classic is also bizarrely moving

The cult writer’s amusing 1992 novel, now published in English, lampoons China’s communist regime via the sex diary of a frustrated biology teacher

Wang Xiaobo’s “Golden Age” is a novel of lust and loss during China’s Cultural Revolution.

Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Chinese writers grappled with the traumas of the Mao period, seeking to make sense of their suffering. As in the imperial era, most had been servants of the state, loyalists who might criticize but never seek to overthrow the system. And yet they had been persecuted by Mao, forced to labor in the fields or shovel manure for offering even