Waves: Stories by Bei Dao
"Our generation's dream is too painful, and too long; you can never wake up, and even if you do, you'll only find another nightmare waiting for you," says a young woman in this collection of six stories and a novella written between 1974 and 1982. The tension between the dead-end despondency the characters see in post-Cultural Revolution China and the passion, hope and anger they express gives Waves its intense vitality. The author, a Beijing resident who is known for his poetry, draws upon an impressive range of literary styles to explore and critique contemporary life under Communism, from the realism of "The Homecoming Stranger," (a father returning after "exactly twenty years of reform through labor") to the surrealism of "13 Happiness Street," in which a journalist seeking to learn who lives in a mysterious house is accused as an "ideological criminal." Bei Dao never mitigates the horrors he recounts by pointing to easy solutions or obvious villains, and his evocation of a troubled marriage in "Melody" suggests that some of the obstacles to human happiness in China may not be so foreign to Americans after all.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.