The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781589881983)

"Incisive, wise, deeply humane, this collection is a true gem from a China scholar who is a rarity in his field. Distilled from a lifelong engagement with Chinese language and culture at an astonishingly high level, a wealth of compelling, compassionate observations and critical dissections, including some rather uncomfortable truths about China, is revealed here through fluid essays as well as Link's ironic personal transformation, to borrow CCP lingo, from 'a friend of China' to 'a hostile foreign element.'"
--Jianying Zha, author of Tide Players and China Pop

Perry Link is a noted Sinologist, sentimentally attached to China in deep ways but also ready to face unpleasant truths squarely. His acerbic essays, collected from a decades-long career, reveal the many ways in which ordinary Chinese people have suffered from the self-serving, erratic, and often disastrous "leadership" of the Communist Party of China.

Link's essays involve politics, society, economy, literature, and art, but their primary focus is on the thoughts, feelings, and values of Chinese people. Link lays out his own values as he explains how, like many of his Chinese friends, he began with a na?ve attraction to socialist ideals only to eventually feel disgust at the cynical betrayal of those ideals as well as garden-variety ethics. His writing probes the ways "comrades" in the ruling regime have ruthlessly clung to and pursued the one value whose pre-eminence has never been in question: political power.

The Anaconda in the Chandelier includes essays on Link's "day job" interests in Chinese literature, popular culture, and language teaching. He also offers intellectual tribute to his own teachers--both classroom teachers and several who taught him through their writing how to see beneath the surfaces of things.