Literary Friends
According to Xiao's autobiography, he met the English novelist E.M. Forster, on 9 May 1941 at the Tagore Memorial Meeting. The event was organized by the English PEN Club. The two became very close friends and often exchanged letters. They disagreed with each other over the issue of homosexuality (Xiao was opposed to legalization).
The friendship, however, did not last. Xiao, fearing for the safety of his family during the Cultural Revolution, destroyed all the letters he had received from Forster and asked Forster not to contact him again. Because Forster might have assumed that Xiao was ignoring him, he burned some of the letters he had kept as a memento of their friendship.
Read more about this topic: Xiao Qian
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or friends:
“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“We, the soldiers who have returned from battles stained with blood; we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes; we who have attended their funerals and cannot look in the eyes of their parents; we who have come from a land where parents bury their children; we who have fought against you, the Palestinians—we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice: enough of blood and tears. Enough.”
—Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995)