ABSTRACT
The essay that follows is a most Ironic description of a writer's experiences struggling for publication and political survival during two "opposite" political climates: in the later stages of the ultraleftist period prior to Mao's death in 1976, and in the early and uneasy reformist era at the turn of the 1980s, when the leftists had been overthrown. This essay may be something of a face-saving gesture by Chen Rong, but her impossible slalom may be taken as a concrete commentary on the more general judgments and warnings delivered by Wu Zuguang in his essay on censorship. All intellectuals who have lived under two regimes—as under the Nazis and the early postwar governments, in the German case—will appreciate and sympathize with Chen Rong's fate.
