This is an engagingly written memoir, originally published in English in 1990, by one of China's finest writers. Born in 1910, Hsiao Ch'ien joined the Communist Youth League and participated in demonstrations against the government before working with Edgar Snow as a translator and publishing his own fiction. He has worked in England and America, becoming friends with E.M. Forster and Bertrand Russell and reported the Nurembourg trials. After returning to China in 1949, he was soon in trouble with the authorities and served 16 years at hard labour. He was formally rehabilitated in 1979 and is today working on the translation into Chinese of James Joyce's Ulysses.