“The War within the Belly”. Wang Xiaobo in the Operating Room of the Cultural Revolution

Abstract

I present here the first translation into Spanish of “The War within the Belly”, an essay by the idiosyncratic writer Wang Xiaobo that features an outlandish first-person account of events taking place at a provincial hospital during the Cultural Revolution. The text provides a first-hand testimony of the chaos, supply shortages, and political fanaticism inflicted upon the Chinese population at that time. The crude depiction of the patients’ hardships is counterbalanced by the author’s detachment; Wang Xiaobo uses sarcasm to criticize the futility and temerity of those in power during those ten lost years, concluding that those were times of ignorance and absurdity, and that many took advantage of it to give free rein to their madness.