Su Xiaokang’s new book “Rain Smoke, Snow, Salt” will be published in Taiwan on March 25, 2025, and the book launch will be held in Los Angeles in April.
The book title, “Rain Smoke, Snow, Salt,” refers to the feelings Su Xiaokang experienced during his exile and conveys the emotional journey of an exile who never gives up after surviving disaster. “Rain and smoke are the anxious curtains of tropical heat; snow and salt are the long winters that North America can never warm up. Drifting between countless extremes, physical and mental illness, interpersonal communication, climate and geography, and global politics are all mixed with joy and sorrow.” (Source: Ink Editor Chen Jianyu).
Book Features: The greatest tragedy of exiles is not speechlessness and loneliness, but spiritual despair.
Synopsis
“Homelessness” is the real dilemma faced by Chinese intellectuals. ── Su Xiaokang
He returned to this world from loneliness, flying back and forth across Europe, South Asia, Taipei, and North America. The “Kyiv flames” were once a flame in memory, but also carried along a dark personal path. In isolation, another downfall occurred, still utterly terrified, gritting his teeth, turning to see the outside world—another kind of desolation of blood and fire, East and West, history and ideology, sorrow and fate.
Having experienced the homeland of literature in Taiwan’s rain and smoke, and then falling into the lonely wilderness of North America’s snow and salt, thirty years of reflection have brought two flavors: a heart that never gives up, crawling in the darkness, life after disaster is so sweet, often awakening from the unpredictable world and turbulent fate, and finally attaining the Tang poetic mood of spring rain and pear blossoms.
Following “Preface to the Soul Leaving and Calamity Journey” and “Lonely Delaware Bay,” Su Xiaokang continues his life and experiences after bidding farewell to Delaware and arriving in Washington with “Rain and Smoke, Snow, and Salt.” He returns from exile to the square, lingering among student movements, societies, and halls, and wakes up from the countryside, surprised to see various scholars, leaders, fathers, charlatans, and old students among the people, transforming between angels and demons, swinging between countless extremes, and feeling sentimental about the institutional pioneers far from their homeland; The final chapter, ‘Sleepless with Spirit,’ looks back on ‘River Sorrow’ and ‘June 4th,’ and there are still endless mysteries.
“We must keep the truth behind us and not be distorted.” This is what Fang Lizhi’s wife, Li Shuxian, said to Su Xiaokang, recorded in the first chapter, “Dark World Mist,” perhaps the reason for the “homeless” exile, who, after enduring terror and witnessing the absurdity and corruption of current politics and the world, insists on writing in detail.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One: The Dark World Misty
Chapter 2: Tears Grieve by the Balustrade
Chapter 3: The Sacred Hall
Chapter 4: The Countryside Wakes
UpChapter 5: Biographies of Reclamation
Chapter 6: Awake and Sleepless
About the author: Su Xiaokang
Born in 1949 by West Lake, he grew up at the foot of Jingshan in the capital, and drifted to the Central Plains as a youth; He began with ‘Apocalypse of the Prehistoric Era,’ leading the wave of ‘problematic reportage literature,’ attempting a writing style once called ‘Su Xiaokang’s style’—that is, ‘panorama’, ‘collective’, and ‘three-dimensional’ ‘journalist-style reportage’ literature, mostly featuring major ‘head-to-head’ themes, often generating explosive effects and fueling the ‘New Enlightenment Movement’; He then led the production of “River Sorrow,” questioning Chinese history, lamenting the decline of civilization, evoking a profound resonance among hundreds of millions, creating a new TV genre, and stirring up a global “cultural debate” among Chinese people. In 1989, he was exiled overseas for thirty years, never stopping his reflection and writing tirelessly. In 2021, won the Taipei International Book Exhibition Grand Prize for “Ghost Pushes the Mill.”
His works include Preface to the Soul Leaving and Tribulation, Lonely Delaware Bay, The Era of Dragon Slaying, Ghost Grinding Mill, West Studio Alley, Plague World, Morning Dawn Whispers, and Sea Lamentation.