This Generation
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Selected from blog posts from 2006-present, This Generation tells the story of modern China from Han Han's unique perspective. Writing on topics as diverse as racing, prostitution, and how to be a patriot, Han Han has written a diary that is not only invaluable for the English-speaking world to understand our rising Eastern partner and rival, but which will long be remembered as a millennial time capsule.
The core of this anthology is drawn from the collection Qingchun (Youth), published in Taipei in 2010, but it also contains a sprinkling of both older and more recent pieces. Presented in chronological order, the sequence opens with a handful of early posts; it excerpts Han Han's work more fully beginning in 2008, the year when he really hit his stride and his blog commanded a larger and larger audience in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. The anthology closes with Han Han's controversial cluster of essays posted in the final days of 2011.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Over the past five years, Han, an insouciant public figure and dashing race car driver, has been churning out blog posts and brief essays with dizzying speed. Ranging over topics from political reform to prostitutes, Han's often sarcastic and regularly satirical writings have been censored by the Chinese government but have won him adoring fans throughout China and around the world. Perhaps because of the translation and perhaps because of the flat-as-pavement prose itself, the blog posts in this first-ever volume of Han's work introduce us to pedestrian observations on any number of subjects. Han reflects on the value of requiring the writing of essays in an academic setting, for example: "Writing essays essentially is a hobby, a love, like gardening or fishing it's not something you can force people to do." On the faltering management of the Chinese government by its officials: "I realize that many things are actually not a problem to begin with, but once officials start to intervene, a small thing becomes big, and big thing blows up in their faces."
