PositiveAirmailAi Weiwei writes sympathetically of his father’s youth, his birth in the waning days of the Qing dynasty, his artistic awakening in Paris, and his pursuit of a life of the mind, even if it meant a life of destitution and itinerancy ... The strands of his father’s life fold in on his own, the echoes of the past reverberating into the present ... Eager to escape the suffocating confines of Beijing, he gets approval in 1981 to study in the United States, landing in New York City and remaining there for 12 years. His writing about this time is some of the book’s most alive, an artist searching for himself ... 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows functions like a handbook for dissent. Ai is given to lofty pronouncements...but these can be excused. They’re presented as a matter of course: flat, inexorable. They’re hard-won ... Ai Weiwei’s memoir becomes another refusal, rejecting obliteration.
