Yang Xianhui lives in Tianjin, China, and worked at a military-style collective farm near the Gobi Desert for sixteen years in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1997, he journeyed to China’s far-flung northwest and spent three years interviewing over a hundred survivors in Jiabangou, a notorious concentration camp that imprisoned thousands of intellectuals and officials who had been branded by Mao as counterrevolutionaries in the late 1950s. He turned those interviews into a series of short stories. In 2000, Shanghai Literature, an influential literary monthly, carried his first story, “The Woman from Shanghai,” which shocked the nation. Spurred on by the strong interest from the public, Shanghai Literature published eleven more stories in the same year. In 2003, as Yang expanded his Jiabiangou series, the Shanghai Art and Literature Publishing House gathered all of his new and previously published stories into one volume, and named the book Farewell to Jiabiangou. Recently, Yang has published Dingxi Orphanage and Chronicles of Southern Gansu, which documents the lives of people in Gansu province in the Mao years.
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Wenguang Huang is a Chicago-based writer, translator, and journalist. He is the author of The Little Red Guard (Riverhead), a memoir that chronicles his growing up in central China during the 1970s; and the coauthor of A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money and an Epic Power Struggle in China (Public Affairs), which chronicles the fall of Bo Xilai and depicts the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party. His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and the Asia Literary Review. He has translated Chinese writer Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (Pantheon), God is Red (HarperCollins), For a Song and One Hundred Songs (Amazon Publishing), and Yan Xianhui’s Women from Shanghai (Pantheon). He received a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Award.
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