The Cave Man is an extraordinary and moving portrait of a man brutalized in Mao’s China, stripped of his most basic human faculties and emotions.

The story begins as Ja Feng is contained within a three-foot by four-and-one-half-foot solitary confinement cell in a prison camp. He has survived this punishment for a miraculous nine months, a period of time that has forced him to question his most basic thoughts and perceptions.

The Cave Man follows Ja Feng once he is released from his solitary confinement, as he is forced to integrate with fellow prisoners who view his skeletal figure and erratic screaming fits as freakish, and his heartbreaking attempts to assimilate into Chinese culture, to reestablish familial bonds and to seek out an ordinary human experience.

A Favorite Book of 2009
"[A] powerful book, bringing to the forefront the awful grace of man's will to survive, no matter what. A moving story and an important book that sheds light not only on historical events but present ones."
-Kassie Rose, WOSU

"When it comes to prison literature, China remains a great enigma. Whereas the Soviet Union gave us Alexander Solzhenitsyn, China has, of yet, produced no such comparable international voice in the modern age. Xiaoda Xiao's The Cave Man is . . . a small start . . . a compelling look at Mao's forced labor prisons."
-Laurel Maury, The Los Angeles Times

"Like Kafka's fiction, Xiaoda's novel illustrates an individual's powerlessness in the face of a pitiless bureaucracy. But he blends that familiar predicament with a more specifically Chinese tragedy, in which the same individual fails to re-integrate into a culture that is nothing if not inexorably collective. Xiaoda's storytelling has plenty of antic vigor for all its grimness, fueled by an activist's anger."
-Donna Rifkind, The Washington Post

"As a parable of modern China, [The Cave Man] is chilling."
-Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

"In The Cave Man, Xiao displays a splendid voice, one all his own. Like Solzhenitsyn, he has transformed his camp experience into sublimely vivid fiction. And like Kafka, Xiao memorably conjures a mad, surreal world, along with its potential both for cruelty and for kindness. A masterful storyteller, Xiao offers us a gorgeously crafted, haunting tale rich in narrative invention as well as character. The Cave Man is as luminous as it is severe, and it will have a transformative effect on those fortunate enough to read it.”
-Jay Neugeboren, Bookforum

"It is the victors who write history. But sometimes the survivors of oppression are able to speak up, to slip in a story or two of their own. The Cave Man by Xiaoda Xiao is one of those stories. The Cave Man is not an easy book to forget . . . a heartbreaking story of the struggle of an individual trying to assimilate back into a society that should welcome his willingness to conform, but instead forces him again and again back into isolation.”
-Brock Kingsley, The Brooklyn Rail

"Hair-raising. Xiao's literary ancestors include Kafka and Solzhenitsyn."
-Charles R. Larson, CounterPunch

"The prose is gritty and dreamlike, and commentators have mentioned Kafka, which is fair enough."
-The Hudson Review

"Xiao's novel has more in common with Kafka's novels than the larger body of gulag literature that The Cave Man is a part of. Ja Feng's crimes seem to be less about a challenge to the system than about the machinations of fate on the "common" man. It's about starting over, becoming a whole man again after being branded a political prisoner."
-The Quarterly Conversation

"Xiao has a skill for lining up his characters on trajectories that play on our need for narrative cohesion, only to pull the rug out from under his reader by moving along, as life does, to a new chapter. In the end, success, love and geography are all just illusions, or feel that way, compared to the reality of remembered pain."
-Robert Kotyk, The Dominion

"[A] crushing debut. The book meanders through years and across continents in a life that is heroic in its resiliency. It's an excellent and moving novel.”
-Publishers Weekly

"A fine and intriguing read ... The Cave Man is a very psychological and entertaining novel."
-Midwest Book Review

"In The Cave Man, Xiaoda Xiao has made a stark and unforgettable contribution to the literature of imprisonment and survival. The Cave Man is sometimes dreamlike, sometimes as stinging and frank as a slap in the face, but no matter where this remarkable novel takes you it never loosens its grip on you, nor does it for a moment surrender its power to astonish, illuminate, and, against all odds, tenderly touch the reader’s heart.”
-Scott Spencer

* Selected by Publishers Weekly as 'An Indie Top 20':
One of "twenty fall titles from indie presses that show big promise."

* Publishers Weekly Talks with Xiaoda Xiao about his time in solitary confinement for reading banned literature and his hopes for his book.

The Cave Man is a work of history in fictional form. In the years 1971–1978 I performed forced labor in one of Mao’s Prison Labor Reform Camps on an island in Lake Taihu in China known as West Hill Island. The camp held several thousands of prisoners, and about half of them had been charged with counterrevolutionary crimes: for listening to foreign radio broadcastings, or spreading political rumors against the central committee of the communist party, or writing anticommunist diaries, or, like myself, for having accidentally torn a poster of Mao.

The characters in this book are based on the real people known as the lucky few who, having survived the subhuman conditions of the prison camps in China, still struggled on the line between life and death, and still feel haunted by the nightmarish days they had gone through in the prison barracks. They had expected that they would be able to enjoy the remainder of their lives freely when they stepped out of the iron gate, only to find themselves living in another prison camp larger than the one they had survived.

One of the real-life inspirations for The Cave Man is a friend named Zhang. Zhang’s brother, Li, who was twenty-six at the time, was tried in a stadium in Nanjing and was executed. He was not alone to face the firing squad, for they also shot his mother who tried to protect her son, with him.

The execution of the mother and son traumatized their neighbors so terribly that one of them, a seven-year -old boy then, turned deaf for the rest of his life. Zhang lost his voice for a year and a half. He was lucky enough to escape the death penalty, but was sentenced to a ten-year prison term. During his imprisonment, he was further punished with solitary confinement and was locked in a solitary cell – as described in the novel – for a year and nine months. [Editor’s Note: In The Cave Man, Ja Feng is locked in a solitary cell for nine months.]

I hadn’t known what happened in a forced labor camp would also take place outside the prison camp until many years later when I worked in the Building Research Institute in Suzhou as an assistant architect. One day, the party chief of the institute ordered his subordinates to lock a male employee in an empty room for pursuing a possible relationship with a female colleague. As a result that man committed suicide by poisoning himself. No one dared say anything against the chief.

This, along with other incidents too numerous to mention taking place all over China in violation of basic human rights, makes me think of the whole country as a prison. It is hard to conclude what I experienced in surviving Mao’s prison camps with one sentence. But I want to say that even under the extremely dark circumstances, I, as an inmate myself, could strongly feel that people around me were still trying to live with a sense of humor. By doing so, I think, they honored life itself.

- Xiaoda Xiao