"Sometimes the survivors of oppression are able to speak up, to slip in a story or two of their own. The Cave Man by Xiaoda Xiao is one of those stories. The Cave Man is not an easy book to forget... a heartbreaking story of the struggle of an individual trying to assimilate back into a society that should welcome his willingness to conform, but instead forces him again and again back into isolation.”—The Brooklyn Rail
“Xiao, a survivor of Mao’s forced labor camps, has, like Solzhenitsyn, transformed his experience into sublimely vivid fiction. Like Kafka, Xiao has made memorable the mad, surreal conditions of the world he conjures up for us—its potential both for cruelty and for kindness. And like Chekhov, Xiao, a masterful storyteller, has given us a gorgeously crafted, hauntingly memorable tale rich in story and in human character. The Cave Man will have a transformative effect on all those fortunate enough to read it.”—Jay Neugeboren, Bookforum
“Xiaoda Xiao has made a stark and unforgettable contribution to the literature of imprisonment and survival.”—Scott Spencer
The Cave Man is an exceptionally moving portrait of a brutalized man named Ja Feng, who has survived punishment in a 3 x 4½ foot solitary cell for a miraculous nine months, a time that has forced him to question his basic human faculties.
The Cave Man follows Feng as he is released from his solitary confinement and as he integrates with fellow prisoners who view his skeletal figure and screaming fits as freakish. It follows him through his heartbreaking attempts to assimilate, to reestablish familial bonds, and to seek an ordinary human experience.
Xiaoda Xiao was arrested in 1971 for tearing a poster of Mao and was sentenced to a five-year prison term as a counterrevolutionary. He spent the next seven years in a prison labor reform brigade. He came to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1989 before the breakout of the democratic movement in Tiananmen Square. He has published stories based on his prison experience during the last years of Mao’s regime in various magazines including The Atlantic Monthly.
