The Chinese ideogram chi is far richer in connotation than the equivalent English verb to eat. Chi can also be read as the mouth that begs for food and words. A concept manifest in the twentieth-century Chinese political reality of revolution and massacre, chi suggests a narrative of desire that moves from lack to satiation and back again. In China such fundamental acts as eating or refusing to eat can carry enormous symbolic weight. This book examines the twentieth-century Chinese political experience as it is represented in literature through hunger, cooking, eating,...