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November 8, 2009
Er Tai Gao, author, and Robert Dorsett, translator, read from In Search of My Homeland.
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Er Tai Gao
Plus...Robert Dorsett, translator of In Search of My Homeland
In Pittsburgh, because of Huang Xiang, we have some first-hand knowledge about the persecution of writers in China. However, relatively little is known in the West about the Chinese gulags. Gao's riveting new memoir, In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp, chronicles the author's years of political persecution under China's Communist government.
“An eloquent testimony to the violation and destruction of humanity…not only about his personal suffering in the remote labor camps and the political persecution he and his family experienced, but also about the fates of many common people… this is not just a book bearing historical witness; it is authentic literature.”
—Ha Jin, author of War Trash and Waiting
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In 1957 at the age of 22, Er Tai Gao wrote an essay stating that freedom was essential to the creation of beauty, and that beauty, in turn, was an expression of freedom. For that, Gao was labeled a "rightist" by the regime under Chairman Mao and sentenced to three years of hard labor in China's central desert. Ninety percent of inmates died during the three years he was imprisoned. During the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Gao was again deemed a "rightist" and sentenced to "supervised labor" under the Red Guard. In 1989 in Beijing, during the Tiananmen protests, he was once again arrested and this time held for six months without charge. Upon his release, he and his wife, Maya, escaped China through Hong Kong in 1992. He was formerly the exiled writer-in-residence with City of Asylum Las Vegas.
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