Boat to Redemption

Translated by Howard Goldblatt, published by Black Swan in April, 2010.

From the original Chinese He'an, by Su Tong.

Boat to Redemption is Howard Goldblatt's translation of the Su Tong 2009 novel He'An, which won the Man Asian Literary Prize 2009.

The story: Su Tong returns to a simpler storytelling style for this controversial tale of a father and son, once honored for their revolutionary martyr mother/wife, and later cast into ignominy by their community. The father castrates himself in protest, and takes his son Dongliang with him into a new life aboard a riverboat. This novel was mildly controversial in China, mostly because of its critical portrayal of China's revolutionary tradition.