2013-523 Arts - Barbara Tyroler for Fall 2013 Arts Grant Agreement $1,000

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In the sun-setting city I felt I once heard something. Not in the least did I feel it was affected. It was pure and natural. It seemed to roll out directly from inside the clouds changing into the air surrounding me. Vben the sound emerged it was a certain whisper in my ear, like the opening and closing of cicada wings. In the beginning it reached me in a whisper, but bouncing inside me it made a sound like a thunderclap, a slow and forceful drumbeat shaking and swelling inside my heart. Every beatprecisely hit the point of my heart without the slightest deviation. From my heart it ran to my arms and legs, eyes, blood, hair, and every end of my veins Afterwards I felt this sound diffused out from my body,fleeing swiftly. It crossed the street and prairie, like a flash of lightning, and thundered when it reach the hori.Zon. *E fi tJAR!9%It R-40W 1 T—')'a]ii�, I%r A OT wit, N*.1AA9if*j1*V This except is the opening paragraph from "Illusion," an essay by Lin Bai published in 1995. "Illusion" appeared in a collection of autobiographical essays in The Moonlight of De Erwo. Samm Sacks translated a selection of Lin Bai's personal essays as part of my senior thesis in Literary Translation at Brown University in 2004. The personal focus of Lin Bai's writing represents a literary development in the post-Mao era of the 1980s in China in which writers—particularly women—emphasized individual voice in a departure from the traditional use of literature as a tool for collective political expression. By making personal emotions and even mundane individual experience the centerpiece of her work, Lin Bai marks a radical shift in 20`' century Chinese literary convention.