2015-01-23 ☼ writing
Pictures of Shi Tiesheng show him wearing the standard issue baggy jumper and squareish, plastic-framed glasses sported by intellectuals of the eighties, and—almost invariably—smiling. Sometimes his wheelchair is in view and sometimes it isn’t. The cause of his disability was usually only vaguely mentioned in the profiles published during his life, and in the numerous fulsome obituaries penned in 2010. It was an illness, or it was an accident, or it was botched medical treatment, or it was some permutation of the three.
Read the whole essay at Words Without Borders.