1. He picks his translators himself. Although he doesn’t speak English he looks for someone who knows the literature of the target language. He isn’t as interested in the Chinese scholars who only know about Chinese literature. He is more interested in having the readers be able to read the book, than a pure translation.
2. Since he went to school during the Cultural Revolution his education was hindered. Therefore, when he began to write he only knew about 4000 characters. The lack of characters led to a sparse writing style. He said from a bad thing came a good thing.
3. Like a good cook who  is made better by eating many different types of food; a writer who samples good writing will become better.
4. He has been lucky to live in a land where changes that have taken place over the last 40 years in China, took 400 years to occur in Europe.
5. His father was a surgeon whose surgery was in the same building as their house and the morgue was next to the bathroom. Occasionally, he would sleep in the morgue because it was cool. He can remember seeing his father covered in blood from surgeries. These memories informed his early works with violence. He also told a little joke wondering what made the trees near the house grow so well, the bathroom or the morgue.
6. When Mao died he said the sound of 1000 people sobbing sounded ridiculous, not sad. He couldn’t keep from laughing. So he put his head down on the stool in front of him. He was shaking from the laughter so much that the teachers thought he was crying the hardest.

[...] the idea that Chinese people ought to “discard their submissive character and assume a more aggressive, or wolf-like, outlook on life and the world at large” (Poon’s words) has caught on like wild-fire in certain circles in China: Featured at business forums, a popular new year’s present for military types — and an inspiration to China’s business publishers.

It is always fascinating what bit of culture can inspire the latest bit of management nonsense.

Written over several years and six visits to al-Andalus (Morocco, Portugal and southern Spain),  we see how Zhang Cheng-Zhi discovers the links between the Moors and China, from the Uighurs in Xinjiang to the port of Quanzhou in Fujian, to the prevalence of fig trees in China’s northwest. Increasingly fascinated by the spirit of the Muslim conquerors, their irrigation technology, and the olive trees so prevalent in southern Spain, he actually tries to transplant them to northwest China. His experiment fails, but his clumsy efforts to somehow grow the olive in China, a fruit rendered sacred by its mention in an oft-repeated Koranic verse (see Chapter 17, below), is an almost desperate attempt to bring part of his beloved al-Andalus back home.

The Tibet Code (4)—He Ma: Latest volume in long-winded tale of mysterious Tibet which begins with sighting of rare Tibetan mastiff. All four volumes best sellers.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being was number 25 this year, too.

Zhang Cheng-Zhi (张承志), the white-hot Red Guard who mastered Mongolian and Japanese — and then converted to Islam — has just launched En las Ruinas de la Flor: Viajes por Al-Andalus (鲜花的废墟). His new Chinese-language travelogue takes us throughout Moorish Spain, Portugal and Morocco in search of the spirit of Islam in its golden age (8th-15th centuries).