Ravi Shankar reviews Empty Chairs by Liu Xia
Empty Chairs
by Liu Xia. Translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern; Introduction by Liao Yiwu; Foreword by Herta Müller
ISBN 978-1-5559772-5-2
Reviewed by RAVI SHANKAR
On April 1st, 2018—that rare conjunction of Easter Sunday with April Fool’s day in the West—Chinese painter, photographer and poet Liu Xia celebrated her 57th birthday as she has every single year since 2010: under house arrest. Better known as the wife of the late Liu Xiaobo, the dissident Chinese academic who was jailed for the last years of his life after co-authoring Charter 08 (that seminal manifesto meant to emulate Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 by making a public case for