Two Weeks In China,
Novelist Publishes Op-ed Piece
Note: Shouhua Qi, an Associate Professor of English at Western Connecticut State University, is the author of When the Purple Mountain Burns: A Novel, Red Guard Fantasies and Other Stories and a dozen other books.
Qi's most recent book -- Red Guard Fantasies and Other Stories -- is dedicated to his father, who was a middle school principal during the Cultural Revolution. Like many other so-called elites, Qi's father suffered intense physical degradation. He was forced to kneel on broken glass with a wooden chalkboard hung around his neck while being denounced by angry mobs. The volume has 14 stories about Chinese society transforming after the Cultural Revolution, including the signature Red Guard Fantasies.
Capitalism running amok in today's China
By Shouhua Qi
Danbury News Times
Aug. 19, 2007
As I stepped from a jet at Shanghai's Pudong International Airport to begin a two-week tour last month, I gasped for breath and was drenched immediately in a soaking sweat.
I was to find out, soon enough, that the source of the brutal heat was more than the Al Gorean inconvenient truth of global warming.
Of course there is the fumous heat puffing out of the tails of cars, gazillions of them, as they gush down the beehive-like expressways that weave in and out of forests of sky-kissing high rises, from airport to train station, from Shanghai to Nanjing to Beijing, and from shining sea to the not-so-shining westward plateaus.
Take Nanjing, my hometown. It adds more than 400 new cars each day to its already congested roads and streets. That is more than 140,000 additional cars a year to a city the size of Manhattan.
More About Qi
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