Laogai: The Machinery of Repression in China
Nan Richardson is an editor, writer, and curator. Co-author of Pandemic: Facing AIDS (2003), Havana (2002), Louise Dahl-Wolfe (2000), The White-T (1996), Drag Diaries (1995) and contributor to periodicals including The LA Times Magazine, The Boston Review of Books, Stern, Granta, Interview, Art News, Artforum, Art in America. Former editor of Aperture magazine. Growing up in the throes of a Communist purge in China, Harry Wu pent nineteen years in the Chinese gulag, known as the laogi, where he survived physical and psychological torture. After his release, Wu worked in the United States first as an unpaid visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and then found a graveyard shift at a