Translator's Introduction

In this Introduction, the volume's translator, Carlos Rojas, provides an overview of Yan Lianke's life and career. The introduction focuses in particular on two opinion pieces that Yan Lianke published in the New York Times in 2013 and 2014, both of which appear in a longer form in this volume and that are representative of some of the volume's broader concerns. The introduction concludes with a brief discussion of an online lecture that Yan Lianke gave in 2020, during the pandemic, in which he uses the pandemic as a starting point from which to reflect on the problem of people willfully forgetting earlier social crises.