Xiaoda Xiao was arrested in 1971 for tearing a poster of Mao and was sentenced to a five-year prison term as a counterrevolutionary. As a result, he spent the next seven years in a prison labor reform brigade on an island in Taihu Lake in Jiangsu province. He came to Amherst, MA, where he lives with his wife, in the spring of 1989, shortly before the break-out of the democratic movement in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Xiao has published stories based on his prison experience during the last years of Mao’s regime in China in various magazines in the U.S., including The Atlantic Monthly. His first novel, "The Cave Man," is to be published by Two Dollar Radio in December 2009. His second book, "The Visiting Suit and Other Tales," is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in 2010.

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