Three classic novellas—
The King of Trees
,
The King of Chess
The King of Childre
n—that completely altered the landscape of contemporary Chinese fiction.
When the three novellas in
were published separately in China in the 1980s, “Ah Cheng fever” spread across the country. Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Mao-speak, and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized not the hardships and miseries of those years, but the joys of close, meaningful friendships. In
, a student’s obsession with finding worthy chess opponents symbolizes his pursuit of the dao; in
The King of Children
—made into an award-winning film by Chen Kaige, the director of
Farewell My Concubine—
an educated youth is sent to teach at an impoverished village school where one boy’s devotion to learning is so great he is ready to spend 500 days copying his teacher’s dictionary; and in the title novella a peasant’s innate connection to a giant primeval tree takes a tragic turn when a group of educated youth arrive to clear the mountain forest.
is a masterpiece of world literature, full of passion and noble emotions that stir the inner chambers of the heart.