Americans take literary freedom for granted, so much so that we often forget there are writers around the globe who are routinely imprisoned or killed for attempting to publish their work. That is what makes Las Vegas’ City of Asylum program a treasure, not just for such writers but also for Southern Nevadans.
Thanks to the program, which operates under the UNLV-based Black Mountain Institute, a literary think tank, former Chinese labor camp prisoner Er Tai Gao was able to complete his memoir. “In Search of My Homeland” covers a tumultuous period of modern China in which intellectual thought was suppressed and cultural artifacts were destroyed. Parts of the memoir will be published this year in English by HarperCollins, and a Taiwanese company has agreed to publish the entire manuscript in Chinese.
As reported Saturday in the Las Vegas Sun by Charlotte Hsu, Gao risked his life while in forced labor as he began secretly writing about his experiences. He landed in the lao gai, China’s labor camp system, after his arrest in 1957 for daring to publish an essay arguing that beauty is subjective, a position at odds with the communist view of beauty as objective in nature.
“In China, there are no museums documenting the atrocities the communists perpetrated,” he told the Sun in Chinese. “So this is all that’s left — these writings.”
After years of imprisonment and after being blocked from teaching or publishing because of his views, Gao and his wife fled to Hong Kong in 1992 and eventually settled in this country.
His participation in the City of Asylum program from 2003 through 2006 followed that of Sierra Leone poet and novelist Syl Cheney-Coker and preceded that of Iranian novelist and short story writer Moniro Ravanipour.
It is difficult to put a price on the value of literature published by authors who have experienced oppression and censorship and have risked their lives to tell their stories. Las Vegas is fortunate to play a role in that process.
Copyright 2009  Las Vegas Sun
