While Ai undoubtedly inherited his father’s stoicism, the defiance that would characterise his later activism was all his own. His sense of isolation was so acute that he refused to answer the door to callers at his grotty apartment in New York His father was assigned to trim trees on a nearby farm and, after a long day’s labour, was forced to attend a public gathering of his fellow exiles, during which he would often be singled out and denounced as a “bourgeois novelist”. For almost a decade, they existed in “a square hole dug into the ground, with a crude roof formed of tamarisk branches and rice stalks, sealed with several layers of grassy mud”. ![]() His wife, exhausted and demoralised, returned to Beijing with their youngest son, but Ai, not yet 10, chose to go with his father.
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