ABSTRACT
Unable to publish throughout 1984 (and denied her diploma at Peking's Central Academy of Drama, although she went on to become a director at the Peking People's Art Theater when the movement was over), Zhang Xinxin in a fit of defiance decided on a new tack. She and a collaborator, the young journalist Sang Ye, toured China to produce a book of oral history in the tradition of Studs Terkel. They called it Beijingren (Peking man, 1985, titled Chinese Lives in the authorized English translation). The work won them overnight worldwide fame. The chaotic and unidealized images of "real life" in the book were a sharp retort to Zhang Xinxin's critics in the Communist party who wanted China's new authors to continue as propagandists, only now for Deng Xiaoping's reforms instead of Mao Zedong's utopianism. Zhang Xinxin has since then written a good deal for the Chinese television and film industries, even while continuing her avant-garde experiments in fiction. She has traveled widely abroad, spending much of her time since 1988 at Cornell University and the University of Georgia. The satiric and self-satiric bite of the mock interview below go far to explain her appeal to critics of smugness both at home and abroad.
