In late December 1984, at a poetry gathering in St. Mark’s Church, a heavily bearded Allen Ginsberg, dressed in a dark suit, read his poetry on the rostrum while a crowd listened keenly below. He was talking about the trip he had just made to China: I learned that the Great Leap Forward caused millions of families to starve, that the Anti-Rightist Campaign against bourgeois “Stinkers” sent revolutionary poets to shovel shit in Xinjiang Province a decade before the Cultural Revolution drove countless millions of readers to cold huts and starvation in the countryside Northwest.
