Baptism : An English Translation of Xizao

名人推薦：

""Playwright, essayist, translator and novelist, Yang Jiang is a legend of modern Chinese literature. With a career spanning more than six decades, Yang has been known for her portraits of Chinese manners in a subtle, sophisticated style. Baptism deals with the mixture of hope and fear that Chinese intellectuals suffered during the first political campaign of the New China. Using her patent style of irony and wit, Yang describes a time that baffled many men and women trying to find a place in a new social order. Even when political fervor and human cruelty is being observed, Yang Jiang never loses her sense of humor and compassion. Baptism is a Chinese masterpiece."" – David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University

""An important contribution to twentieth-century Chinese literature, Baptism's compelling story of thwarted romance and broad social conflicts set in post-Second-World-War China offers a feminist and humanist critique of the politics of possessive individualism and of the revolutionary ideology of the masses that had set out to overcome it. In this complex portrayal of complicit, although apparently opposed, value worlds, the novel's ironic, satirical edge both savages a spectrum of Chinese intellectuals scrambling for survival in a new China and yet discovers a moral center in the delicate sensibility of its heroine, a holdover from a pre-Communist era, promising a possible future when individual integrity can be recovered."" – Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Author of Among the White Moon Faces and Sister Swing; Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara

""Set in the early years after the Communist revolution, Baptism is at once a satirical indictment of intellectuals – whose hypocrisy, pettiness, and arrogance might seem to justify the need for a political 'cleansing' – and a sympathetic portrait of how they cope with a new and nasty political culture that demands ideological purity and uniformity. The novel is both humorous and terrifying."" – Kirk A. Denton, Associate Professor, The Ohio State University