Sometimes fiction is the only way a story can be remembered. I still remember going to China in '96 and the Americans I was with kept badgering our hosts about Tiananmen Sq, being totally clueless that the rooms were bugged and that they were putting our hosts lives at risk by asking them.
37 years after #June4, who gets to write about it, for whose consumption, and to what end? For @chinabooksreview.com, I examine Tiananmen in novels. The real question is not whether historical accuracy can give way to poetic license, but what truths are sought and revealed by the imaginary accounts.
After 37 years, the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown of 1989 have been preserved in novels as much as in memory. But does the Anglophone literary imagination get it right?
