No time to be funny

Author Yan Lianke says the reality he represents in his works is tragic, but people in the West regard it as satire. Yang Yang reports.

Chinese writer Yan Lianke is a humorous man. Like his novels, his conversation is often witty and is full of plans that sound absurd at first but are real and sad when you digest them.

For example, the 57-year-old says that when he read his first foreign novel, Gone With the Wind, he was 20 years old. Before that all he read was Chinese revolutionary literature, so he thought all literature in the world was red.