The Cultural Revolution created two extremes for China.

There is indeed no place like China–but that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Finally they dismembered him and hung his head on the city walls for a week.

I was more or less enjoying the daytime / I was watching grass sprout from cracks in the asphalt

It's just a dead kid, what are you making such a fuss about?

Zheng Xiaolu, editor of a literary magazine, is only twenty-five years old. He was probably twenty-two when he wrote this story.

On the evening of the tenth day of the seventh lunar month, we “invited” all the ancestors to our home.

A dog learns to run forward with a lighter in its mouth

Mozart says / keep your eye on this Beethoven / he’s going to rock the world

Even god was still dreaming

We were quite bewitched and forgot to ask her what the afterlife was like

Just hold my hands tightly. I won’t force you to kiss me or do anything.

people on two banks / change batch after batch / like summer fireflies

Those who ordered her to kneel on snail shells / are mostly dead

Docile black eyes stare out in terror.

I tried to transform the world: that was one thing I knew about myself at that age.

I was nobody, like a piece of sesame in a big pot of soup.

If you happen to be behind bars, you should keep talking . . .

I learned the lines of this noun / one bright day in the classroom.

A blizzard lures us toward Poland, / bringing us almost to the border.

To leave the airport is to feel you've got off at the wrong stop.

We see so much that is strange.

I'll be opposite you, opposite you, lying prone.

You could see an afterglow / A glory that you should not miss

Ten hundred miles I am apart

When I didn't have a cent to my name / He lent me his money

She smells the grass, the crops

Many years away from the village / The village still lives in me

No matter how rich, how famous you are

The sweat was pouring off me, and I was not in the mood.

Couldn't sleep. She was lying on the bed, eyes closed, but she hadn't the slightest sensation of sleepiness.

Basically nobody had doubts about the name of A-Gump.

The two of them are quite different in the ways they paint, and their works have distinctly different styles.

I am a countrywoman.

At the time, young wives in our village didn't have regular names.

You noticed the way she came over, her chest out, eyes narrowed? She's interested.

Dong Putao hadn't been at work long when a shadow passed over the door.

“I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity.”…

Yet she pulls me like the moon. The melancholy between her eyebrows makes my heart throb with pain.

Beijing's cab drivers are the best in the world.

The wheat pointed to the glorious future: of glorious harvests in the glorious times to come once Communism had been realized.

even ants tremble at nightfall

Flying over God's mountains, canyons, wastelands

So many things follow us / like the moon, listening for our primal cries.

The first ten years of my life,

Nothing is intolerable if you've made up your mind that you have to put up with it.

Too much love / somehow became / no love at all

Autumn rains darken azure-deep skies.

Dharma companions filling mountains, / a sangha forms of itself: chanting, sitting

When you came on twisted rocky paths, / who welcomed you at my mountain gate?

Returning you to StoneTower Mountain, we bid farewell

In night quiet, spring mountains stand

Crystalline waters quiet settling night. / Moonlight leaving idleness everywhere

Frail water-chestnut vines never settle, / and light cottonwood blossoms fly easily.

In these twilight years, I love tranquility / alone.

Now, if I look for old masters here, / I find empty rivers and mountains.

I can't bear this any longer! she cried in distress, seizing me by the arm.

Sitting alone       within a hidden bamboogrove    plucking the qin   repeating longhowls        in a deep forest no one knowsbright moon …

A strong desire to climb high          No onecomes to offer wine            So forlorn fordistant             …