Confucius was also an indefatigable traveller, and Wang himself shows no signs of slowing down. In September, two weeks before Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize was announced, Wang gave a talk at Harvard’s Asia Center. Before he arrived, he lamented to me how little dialogue there had been, in the post-1989 era, between Chinese and American writers—less, he said, than between Chinese and American military officials. He had prepared his talk in English, in the hopes of speaking across a chasm. At Harvard, he described his childhood deprivations and his youthful involvement in the Chinese revolution. He recalled a conversation he had had when his grandson turned fourteen, the age at which Wang joined the Communist Party. When he criticized the boy for spending too much time on computer games, he replied, “Poor Grandpa, I’m sure you had no toys when you were a kid. If you had a childhood without toys, what else could you do except join the revolution?”

attached to: Wang Meng