“…The house of fiction has a million windows, Henry James wrote, but in China, the windows have long been shaded by the Writers’ Union, the literary agents of the Communist government. We begin to see more through these windows than just sexually liberated Chinese nymphets romping with Westerners in the bedroom, as in Hong Ying’s K. One longs for more translations of stories like Li Rui’s Silver City, a sprawling novel that takes us from the intrigues and struggles of the Li and Bai clans during the pre-Communist 1920s to the Communist takeover, and then up to the Cultural Revolution. Or tales like Wang Anyi’s Lapse of Time, quiet and probing portraits of the inner lives of people enduring the adversity and sadness of China’s tumultuous history, such as the Cultural Revolution or times when people went nearly mad from hunger. Nevertheless, now that the book has become a commodity in Chinese culture, commercial glimmerings on the mainland and abroad–like Hong Ying’s K–begin to illuminate the many windows that will develop in the house of Chinese fiction.”