Gathers personal reflections on life and literature by 44 of China's leading authors, aiming to show how Chinese society and its creative writing have supported, competed and fought with each other for the past 40 years. The essays cover war, revolution, betrayal and commitment.

Overview: Chinese Writers on Writing, Retrospective Introduction, Enforced Silence or Emigre Uncertainties: Options for Chinese Writers after a Decade of Experiments and Growth, Contributors, I. LITERATURE FROM THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC HISTORICAL BLUNDERS, The Enigmatic Laughter oflnsanity: A Modern Love Story, A Written Testimonial: About the Cultural Revolution, I Am Not Solzhenitsyn: From an Eyewitness of the Labor Camps, On Behalf of Humanism: The Confession of a Former Leftist, FURTHER VICTIMS OF POLITICS IN THE EIGHTIES, Against Those Who Wield the Scissors: A Plea for an End to Censorship, China's Contemporary Literature: Reaching Out to the World and to the Future, Reflections in the Hot Springs of Hakone: China, Our Impoverished, Tmuble-Ridden Motherland, PATTERNS OF THE NEW LITERATURE, Banished to Xinjiang: Or, About Bestial Hatred of Literature, Novels Strangled in the Cradle: My Senseless Literary Battles, Spokesman for a Victimized Generation: Can There Be Progress after Midlife?, After Twenty Years of Silence We Lick Our Wounds: Our Battle for a Place in World Literature, ACCOUNTS OF RURAL REALITIES, Thrusts of Violent Creativity: ''I Returned with My Hands Empty and Shame on My Face, The Slow Maturation of My Craft: Tea in Cold Water Steeps Slowly, Life Is Changing, Even in Hilly Shangzhou, RISING IN PROTEST: A NEW GENERATION, The First Half of My Life: A Boy from the City Struggling for Survival in Far-Away Yunnan, AGAINST COMPLACENCY: WOMEN WRITERS, The Boat I Steer: A Study in Perseverance, Needed: A Spirit of Courageous Self-Examination, DOCUMENTARY LITERATURE, Is Reportage to Be Excluded from the Realm of Literature? The Function of Warning Bells, A ''Bengal Tigress'' Interviews Herself: A Panorama of Our Times from Within, THE SEARCH FOR ROOTS, After the Literature of the Wounded: Local Cultures, Roots, Maturity, and Fatigue, COMBINING PAST AND PRESENT, We Must Not Forget Our Historical Roots: Popular Literature, Peking Opera, and Modern Prose, AN ABRUPT END TO PRC LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTIES, The June 4 Syndrome: Spiritual and Ideological Schizophrenia, II. WITHOUT A REGIME OR A REGIMEN: ENTERTAINMENT FICTION ADVENTURE NOVELS, Against the Authors of Foreign Books in Chinese Language: An Interview with China's Most Popular Writer of Adventure Novels, III. CHINESE LITERATURE FROM TAIWAN MODERNISTS AND SEMI-EMIGRES, The Chinese Student Movement Abroad: Exiled Writers in the New World, On the Miseries of Writers in American Exile: Sanitized Versions for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People's Republic, Such a Symphony of Written Characters One Must Not Allow to Disperse, THE NATIVE REALISTS: BLACK HUMOR AND OTHER EXPERIMENTS, How Love Scatters: On the Publication of the First Collection of My Works, Father's Writings Have Been Republished: Or, The Sexuality of Women Students in a Taibei Bookstore, Things Chinese and Foreign, Ancient and Modern: An Absurd Comedy, IDEOLOGISTS, Against Taiwan's Orphan Mentality: The Author as His Own Critic, Native Literature as a Stimulus for Social Change: From a Writing Career to Political Activism, ALIENATION, WITHDRAWAL, AND DISSENT, Cold Ashes in the Heart: The Tragedy of Taiwanese Literature, Concern About the Native Land: On the Taking of a Pseudonym, NEW GENERATIONS, From Taibei's Suburbs: Into the Hubbub of Taiwan's Economic Miracle, Protest of a Woman Author Against Reckless Accusations: Another Self-Interview, This Time from Taibei, Vanished Virility: Stories-My Last Remaining Castle, IV. THE REPUBLICAN ERA REVISITED CHANGING TIMES, Suppressed Furor Against Foreign Troops: An Unwritten Novel and a Play about the Boxer Uprising, A Literary Outcry: Awakening from Unconsciousness, My J'accuse Against This Moribund System: Notes on a Crumbling Landlord Clan of Western Sichuan, Shanghai's Silk Industry: World Economic Crisis, Workers, and Civil War, NEW FORMS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, Fiction and Society: Changes and Continuities in Mass Audiences, International Shanghai, 1941: Coffee House Chat about Sexual Intimacy and the Childlike Charm of the Japanese, Foolish Dreams: Like a Blind Person Going Fishing, Early Autobiographical Fragments: A Young Sojourner in a Foreign Land, Glossary, Translators and Writers Translated, Bibliographies, Index