Cheng Ah

Ah Cheng, Chinese writer and painter. His father, the film critic Zhong Dianfei, was forced by the Communist government to sell his library of Chinese and Western classics, which Ah Cheng secretly read before delivering them to the book dealer. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to work on commune farms in Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan. After returning to Beijing in the late 1970s he gained recognition for his drawings, stories, essays, and film scripts. In the mid-1980s he was a prominent advocate of "seeking roots" literature, a movement by young writers to reestablish their cultural roots, which had been lost during the social upheavals of the previous two decades. He is best known for his series of "king" novellas.