1949: China, Trauma and Memory

This slim volume will be an interview with Taiwan's most famous activist and author, Dr. Lung Yingtai. It's a conversation between Yingtai and Duke professor Eileen Cheng-yin Chow about politics, activism, and writing, in which they discuss: personal history as national history, the public role of a writer in a places like Taiwan and China, and the writerly life as a woman, activist, and mother. Yingtai's most famous book, Big River, Big Sea--which will be excerpted and translated in this collection of interviews--has been banned in mainland China but is widely read among Chinese speakers and its diaspora. She describes it as "a novel in which everything is true."