This is a collection of interviews with 26 writers of China's "zhiqing" generation, relatively young artists who participated in the Cultural Revolution as teen-age Red Guards, suffered through the subsequent rustication of intellectual youth, and eventually returned to relatively normal lives, but always with a tragic hiatus haunting their formative years. While one goal of Professor Leung is to introduce to the West an important group of writers little-known outside China, she also aims to succeed, through the interviews, in providing a special perspective on the devastating political history of China since the 1970s years through the eyes of its keenest observers and in offering a perspective on the social, political and cultural milieu of the period.
