Grass Soup

"Rehabilitated" in 1979, former political prisoner Zhang Xianliang recovered from the authorities a diary he had kept while in a labour camp during the 1960s. This book is a detailed annotation to the necessarily terse entries in that diary, and describes the frightening process by which a major civilization can destroy its own humanity by mass complicity, yet at the same time shows how small gestures and acts of kindness can keep hope alive.