CHAIRMAN MAO WOULD NOT BE AMUSED: Fiction...

CHAIRMAN MAO WOULD NOT BE AMUSED: Fiction From Today’s China edited by Howard Goldblatt (Grove Press: $13.; 321 pp.). As Goldblatt notes in his introduction, Mao Tse-tung believed that literature should buttress politics. But these writers neither attempt to speak for the masses nor preach Marxist ideology. Instead, they draw grim portraits of alienated people in a society caught between Third World poverty and First World industrialization. The narrator of Kong Jieshing’s “The Sleeping Lion” (translated by Susan McFadden) offers a telling reflection on the moral bankruptcy that surrounds him: “But is there really any law? I am not so sure. And if it did exist at one time, where is it now? . . . At times of crisis, we offer it up as a sacrifice, but when the crisis has passed, we no longer think in such terms.”