num_pages: 208
description: Three classic novellas The King of Trees  The King of Chess  The King of Childre nthat completely altered the landscape of contemporary Chinese fiction. When the three novellas in The King of Trees were published separately in China in the 1980s Ah Cheng fever spread across the country. Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms discarding Mao-speak and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized not the hardships and miseries of those years but the joys of close meaningful friendships. In The King of Chess  a students obsession with finding worthy chess opponents symbolizes his pursuit of the dao; in The King of Children made into an award-winning film by Chen Kaige the director of Farewell My Concubine an educated youth is sent to teach at an impoverished village school where one boys devotion to learning is so great he is ready to spend 500 days copying his teachers dictionary; and in the title novella a peasants innate connection to a giant primeval tree takes a tragic turn when a group of educated youth arrive to clear the mountain forest. The King of Trees is a masterpiece of world literature full of passion and noble emotions that stir the inner chambers of the heart.
language: English
title: The King of Trees: Three Novellas: The King of Trees, The King of Chess, The King of Children
publisher: New Directions