Travels With My Chinese Censor

There are a couple of things that I should clarify. The first is that I weigh a hundred and fifty pounds. The second is that it’s not really fair to describe Zhang Jiren as a censor. It’s true that he makes my books politically acceptable to the Chinese authorities, but censorship is only one of his duties. Zhang directs the nonfiction division at Shanghai Translation, where he also has to find translators, edit manuscripts, gauge political risks, and handle publicity. He’s thirty-seven years old but looks younger, a thin man with buzz-cut hair and owlish glasses. His background is in philosophy, and he wrote a master’s thesis on Herbert Marcuse, the neo-Marxist thinker. Once, Zhang told me that he had studied Marcuse because his ideas are “a powerful tool for Chinese to resist the long-term propaganda campaigns.”