The Last Days of Lao She in The New Yorker

I blogged rather a lot last year about Lao She thanks to the publication of Anne Witchard’s Lao She in London and then Penguin China’s reissuing of Lao She’s great novel of 1920s London, Mr Ma and Son. Somehow along the way I also penned a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books about why Lao She never won a Nobel Prize too. Of course the Lao She story never ends well, but rather ends in the Cultural Revolution with Mao’s madness, denunciations and suicide. So China Rhyming readers may well be interested in the fascinating article in a recent issue of The New Yorker by their (now I think former) Beijing correspondent Evan Osnos on Confucianism. The article centres on the temple in Beijing where Lao She was bullied and beaten by Maoist Red Guards and deals, in part, with this awful event and the legacy of it for the temple. It’s not all available on line so you’ll have to track down a copy somehow I’m afraid….