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Hong Kong's Blacksmith Books has published a short story collection by Xujun Eberlein. Below is an introduction to the book by Pete Spurrier, of Blacksmith, followed by an extract from the book.

It was some decade. The universities were closed. Students were at war. Poetry was banned. And the word “love,” unless applied to Mao, was expressly forbidden. Artists were denounced, and many opted for suicide. This is the time – its madness, its passion, its complexity – that Xujun Eberlein brings to life in Apologies Forthcoming, her moving collection of short stories about those who lived during and after China’s Cultural Revolution.

This book won the third annual Tartt Fiction Award when it first appeared in the United States, and an Asian edition has been published in Hong Kong.

Xujun is “a fresh voice in American fiction, a Chinese writer with a remarkably shrewd, interesting tongue” according to Jay Parini. But the stories here are based on true experience. Born in Chongqing, Xujun was sent to the countryside after leaving high school, and emigrated to the US in 1988. She blogs about current affairs at Insideout China.

“My big sister died at the age of 16 as a Red Guard,” she says. “She was both a participant and a victim of the Cultural Revolution, but foremost she was my dear sister. Her death planted in me a ‘Cultural Revolution complex.’ For three decades after her death in 1968, I couldn’t bear to look back at that summer, yet the wound in my heart was never healed. It was only after 9/11 that I finally began to write a memoir piece about her. I cried constantly when I was writing and revising it. This non-fiction piece, titled Swimming with Mao, was later published in Walrus in 2006. The story Feathers in this collection is a fictionalized account of that same incident, from a different angle by a more distant narrator. That story then became the first of a bunch featuring young protagonists of the time.”