Inspired by correspondent Yan Liang and by the BBC documentary her April 19 post has drawn my attention to, I have been looking for more information about Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who has not been heard from since his arrest early this month.
For those of us unable to read Mandarin, The Guardian is a good source, with reports from Tania Branigan in Beijing and this moving video on its site. Ai speaks on camera about his father, a popular poet banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and the impact of that on his own career as an activist.
My father’s experience definitely has to bear some weight. I have to speak for the generations who don’t have any way to speak out. Before they speak out the first sentence, they are crushed. I also have to speak out for the people around me who are afraid […] So I want to set an example: You can do it. And this is OK, to speak out.
Meanwhile, the social campaigns website Change.org, which hosts a petition calling for Ai’s release, has alleged that Chinese hackers made the site inaccessible on Monday. According to Branigan, the US-based site has since stabilized the platform.
Ai
Weiwei is not the only prominent victim of a crackdown by Chinese authorities.
As novelist Salman Rushdie writes this morning in The New York Times,
writer Liao Yiwu was denied permission to travel to the United States to attend
the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature (which begins in New
York April 25), “and there are fears that he could be the regime’s
next target.”
Liu Xianbin was sentenced last
month to prison for incitement to subversion, the same charge leveled against Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, currently serving an 11-year term.
Rushdie concludes this morning's op-ed piece by saying,
Creative figures like Mr. Ai and his colleagues are often the only ones with the courage to speak truth against the lies of tyrants. We needed the samizdat truth-tellers to reveal the ugliness of the Soviet Union. Today the government of China has become the world’s greatest threat to freedom of speech, and so we need Ai Weiwei, Liao Yiwu and Liu Xiaobo.
Linda Leith
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Aside from necessary funds, restoring a landscape or great garden requires patience, understanding, knowledge, and a good helping of genius. Gardens, unlike pyramids or palaces, can disappear through neglect, financial collapse, or death of original maker. They are often staked to the fortunes of the families.
Eden Project, Cornwall
Habs fever hit Endre Farkas as a small boy in Communist Hungary with the surprise arrival of a red wool sweater with a CH in the middle.
Marie-Soleil, a woman approaching forty, wants to have a baby. She has no partner and no opportunity of finding a donor whose identity she knows in her host country, Canada.
Translation by Jonathan Kaplansky of an excerpt from Cristina Montescu's unpublished novel A Hole in the Belly.
There have been too many shows of impatience and anger, with each side blaming the other. With few exceptions, this has all been a question of words -- sharp words, throw-away words, unthinking words -- but they have succeeded in hardening attitudes and deepening divisions. Fine words are not all it takes to improve matters, but they can help a great deal in such a language-obsessed city as Montreal.
