The King of Trees: Three Novellas: The King of Trees, The King of Chess, The King of Children

Synopsis

Three classic novellas― The King of Trees , The King of Chess , The King of Childre n―that completely altered the landscape of contemporary Chinese fiction. When the three novellas in The King of Trees were published separately in China in the 1980s, “Ah Cheng fever” spread across the country. Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Mao-speak, and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized not the hardships and miseries of those years, but the joys of close, meaningful friendships.