In The Monster That Is History, literary scholar David Der-wei Wang considers the taowu, an ancient Chinese monster described as “like a tiger with a human face.” This fiendish beast was made all the more ominous by its divinatory ability to see both past and future. Ancients cautioned others to “remember and recount [the taowu’s] wickedness so as to take precaution,” and eventually the taowu came to be seen as the embodiment of history itself. This, Wang argues, makes it an adept metaphor for both the violence of twentieth-century Chinese history and the literature that seeks to depict it.

Anselm