Jonathan Spence writes:

Between 1994 and 1996, Zhu Wen wrote the three sardonic and meticulously observed novellas that form the bulk of this book: ‘I Love Dollars’ in 1994, ‘A Boat Crossing’ in 1995, and ‘A Hospital Night’ in 1996. All three have been splendidly translated by Julia Lovell, and together they give us an absorbing portrait of the go-go years in China just before Deng Xiaoping’s death. It is hard to imagine that any other Chinese writer, however talented and sharp, will be able to produce a book about this period that is at once so sad, so hideously funny, so suffused with the feel – and the smell – of the old China, so intimate and yet so detached.

(LRB 6 September 2007)

Available in a paperback edition

Columbia | hardback 228 pp. |ISBN: 9780231136945