Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre

A “memorable series of portraits of the working class people who defended Tiananmen Square” (The New York Review of Books) during the protests from the award-winning poet, dissident, and “one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time” (Philip Gourevitch).

Much has been written about the Tiananmen Square protests, but very little exists in the words of those who were actually there.

For over seven years, Liao Yiwu—a master of contemporary Chinese literature, imprisoned ...