Writing Right In Pittsburgh, City Of Asylum

Huang Xiang “earned international attention in 1978 when he and friends traveled 1,500 miles to Beijing and posted his political poems on a wall in the street. The Democracy Wall Movement, as it became known, put him at odds with the authorities. For the next 20 years, he was jailed numerous times, blamed for inciting a riot and sent to labor camps. It was only when a Beijing company revoked a long-awaited publishing contract because of governmental pressure that Huang saw a way out of China.” Eventually he got to America, where he became part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh…