THE ANACONDA IN THE CHANDELIER

A potpourri of critical observations about contemporary China from a noted sinologist.

Retired Princeton professor Link, now at the University of California, Riverside, is an expert on Chinese literature and popular culture. This collection of essays, most of them previously published, includes book reviews, op-ed pieces, literary criticism, and memoirish vignettes he’s written for the New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and other venues. Grouped under four categories, “Captive China,” “Learning,” “Teachers,” and “Day Job Joys,” these essays, rendered in Link’s lucid prose, take us back to his early days as a student of Chinese literature in the 1960s, when China was virtually closed to the West. Link’s first in-person glimpse of China came in the fall of 1966, when he peered over the border separating the skyscrapers of Hong Kong from the rice paddies of Shenzhen—and spotted a water buffalo. From that first sighting, the young, naïve aficionado of Maoist China went on to teach Chinese language and literature at various U.S. colleges and became an authority in the field who was welcomed by China. But after he became interested in dissident writers, especially in the wake of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, when he became vocal about human rights issues, Link was blacklisted by the Chinese government and has been denied entry to the country since 1996. While watching China from afar once again, Link wrote many pieces with a touch of nostalgia and a hunger for truth, whether reviews of fiction by authors like Ha Jin and Mo Yan, obituaries of dissenting intellectuals like Fang Lizhi and Liu Binyan, or scholarly studies of popular art forms like xiangsheng (crosstalk).

Readers interested in contemporary China will find useful perspectives in these essays by a veteran China watcher.