1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

In this impassioned and elegant work, acclaimed Chinese artist and activist Weiwei (Humanity) tells his story alongside his father’s—renowned poet Ai Qing—to describe the personal cost of resistance. In 1957, the year Weiwei was born, Qing was exiled during China’s purge of “rightist” intellectuals, first to the far northeast and later to the base of Xinjiang’s Tian Shan mountain range. “The whirlpool that swallowed up my father... [left] a mark on me that I carry to this day,” Weiwei writes. Though Qing’s reputation was later restored, Weiwei, at 19, felt alienated by “the new post-Mao order.” Novelistic in its scope and detail, his story follows his search for freedom across decades and borders, from New York City—where he moved in 1981 and found minor success as an artist—back to Beijing in 1993, where he continued his subversive art, “damaging the past and reconstructing it.” Despite being commissioned to design Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics (“I was as much of an attraction to [Westerners] as the Great Wall”), Weiwei continued to rail against the country’s oppressive systems with his art and writing, continuing to do so even after his imprisonment in 2011. Astounding and provocative, this easily sits in the top tier of dissident writing. Agent: Peter W. Bernstein, Bernstein Literary. (Nov.)