"What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it traces China’s tumultuous recent history through the eyes of its most renowned twentieth-century poet, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Weiwei, now equally renowned in the global art world."

"It guides us from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist era in the 1930s, through Mao Zedong’s revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, and on to the 'reform era' of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and Xi Jinping’s current Leninist restoration, explaining how, as Ai Weiwei writes, 'the whirlpool that swallowed up my father upended my life too, leaving a mark on me that I carry to this day.'... It does not take many pages of this memoir to leave one feeling drowned in toxic revolutionary brine. But even as readers will be repelled by the relentless savagery of China’s capricious revolution, they will be uplifted by this father-and-son story of humanism stubbornly asserted against it. Ai Weiwei reminds us that freedom is part of being human in the modern world: 'Although China grows more powerful, its moral decay simply spreads anxiety and uncertainty in the world.'" 

Writes Orville Schell, "The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei/Ai Weiwei’s memoir is a father-and-son story of devotion to free expression and resistance to state pressure" (NYRB). 

The book — which I finished reading yesterday — is "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows." 

I should add — on the subject of fathers — that Ai Weiwei has his own son, and, in the text, that little boy flows from his grandfather and father. I highlighted this:

One day in my studio, Ai Lao turned to me and said, very seriously, “I don’t just do whatever I feel like doing—first I do something, and then I look at what it is.” 

He had developed a special interest in words, a flair for language. On August 13, he wrote a poem to his grandma. “Fire, why do you burn so fiercely? Mars does not answer, and just keeps burning. Mercury and Mars are so far away they never need to bump into each other, and a desert lies between them, a desert with a pagoda.” 

Once, in the car, I was telling him stories and asked, “What should we write on a hero’s tombstone?” 

“Dad, write this,” he said. “ ‘I hope a breeze that likes him blows over his tombstone.’ ” I loved that line. Keep it for me, I thought.