In Praise of Wang Meng-II.

This article focuses on Wang Meng, now deposed Minister of Culture of China. In Xinjiang, Wang Meng learned the Turkic Uighur language and, although officially forbidden to write, he some-how readied himself for the important short stories and novels he was to publish very soon after his rehabilitation in 1979, a year after the Cultural Revolution ended. I first met him soon afterward, while he was spending four months as a guest in the University of Iowa's International Writers Program.