Fragments Written at the Hiatus of Illness

These eighteen soul-searching pieces are derived from Shi Tiesheng’s Fragments Written at the Hiatus of Illness, which was written when the disabled writer was hospitalized for uremia. In this collection of 243 short pieces of prose, the writer employed third-person and first-person perspectives side by side to create the sense of a split self that is both trapped in a disabled/diseased body and is transcendental. The pieces selected for this special section are Shi’s crystallized reflections on fate, love, self, disability, sexuality, and writing.