overwriteYourstory@2009
Artificial Rats and Electric Cats
By Robert Masterson
Communications from Transitional China, 1985-1986
World-travelled writer Robert Masterson brings us this collection of eighteen prose and verse pieces based on his experiences in transitional China during the mid-eighties. An unflinching look at China's citizens and practices during the uncertain march to market reform, Masterson conveys what he witnessed with the same lucid honesty which got him threatened with violence when uncovering local corruption in New York politics and winning awards for his reportage from Chernobyl and the surrounding Ukraine. These accounts range from his alter ego witnessing the lead-up to an execution, to teaching Chinese students English, to turning the tables on a gang-run swindle. Masterson's stay in China ended only after being beaten by a xenophobic mob, covered by the Associated Press, and reproduced here.
"Robert is way more than a writer. He tells the important parts and burns the rest. He is a master at picking little things that say something much bigger than they reasonably should. There’s no vanity or lying or pretending."
-Carl Petersen, from the Foreword
By Robert Masterson
Communications from Transitional China, 1985-1986
World-travelled writer Robert Masterson brings us this collection of eighteen prose and verse pieces based on his experiences in transitional China during the mid-eighties. An unflinching look at China's citizens and practices during the uncertain march to market reform, Masterson conveys what he witnessed with the same lucid honesty which got him threatened with violence when uncovering local corruption in New York politics and winning awards for his reportage from Chernobyl and the surrounding Ukraine. These accounts range from his alter ego witnessing the lead-up to an execution, to teaching Chinese students English, to turning the tables on a gang-run swindle. Masterson's stay in China ended only after being beaten by a xenophobic mob, covered by the Associated Press, and reproduced here.
"Robert is way more than a writer. He tells the important parts and burns the rest. He is a master at picking little things that say something much bigger than they reasonably should. There’s no vanity or lying or pretending."
-Carl Petersen, from the Foreword
"Just before dawn of our seventh day in the Manchurian high-desert compound, a truck’s sudden misfire roughly startled me awake from the lush orchids of the languid late-summer lawn party stop-time dream-geography I’d inhabited each long night since our capture into an instant of utter, flint-like clarity: My immensely-talented comrade and long-suffering friend Robert Masterson is the kindest, bravest, warmest, and most wonderful writer I’ve ever met."
-Lee Bartlett
-Lee Bartlett