During the Cultural Revolution, children killed parents, lives were broken irrevocably, millions were beaten and starved to death – and Wang Xiaobo wrote an erotic comic novel about it all.
Now one of China’s most popular modern writers, Wang was completely unknown when he released Golden Age in Taiwan in 1992; now it is available for the first time in complete form in a sparky, earthy translation by the young Chinese American translator Yan Yan. Wang wrote prolifically, torrentially, for the next five years, scandalising the authorities and titillating the public, until his death in 1997, when his novels moved from black-market editions to more freely disseminated, semi-sanctioned copies.
