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. Read More 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.