King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, starts with Lear dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Goneril and Regan win the kingdom through flattery, Cordelia’s honesty is rewarded with exile.

That opening—and the other developments in Lear’s tragic story—hold special resonance for Nan Z Da, who uses Shakespeare’s play as a way to grapple with China’s history, and her own personal experiences with it. The result is The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear.

Nan Z Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2018).

Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.