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A novelist and essayist, Su Wei takes inspiration from his years being "reeducated" in the countryside of tropical Hainan Island in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. His fiction takes an unusual approach to this brutal chapter of history, blending fantasy and realism.
Su Wei left China in 1989 and now heads the Yale Chinese language program. Though official censorship kept him out of the literary limelight in China for many years, his works have been quietly accruing praise, and critics now consider his novel Witching Vale to be one of the seminal works of literature dealing with the Cultural Revolution.
I met Su Wei during my undergraduate studies at Yale. In the years since, he has become a close friend and mentor of mine. In May 2009 I traveled with Su to the farm on Hainan Island where he spent the years between age fifteen and twenty-five, on which the setting of Witching Vale is loosely based.
About Witching Vale
Witching Vale is the tale of a spunky, nonconformist "sent-down youth" (one of the millions of middle- and high-school age students exiled to the countryside to "re-educated" after the Cultural Revolution) who discovers a hidden utopia, an isolated community of migrants living deep in the jungles of Hainan Island. When their matriarch Jade takes him as lover, he must play a precarious balancing game between two worlds: the haunted society of the "driftfolk," and the twisted irrationalities of Mao’s China.
Samples from Witching Vale