Like father, like son

In the middle of the night, after a particularly tough day of interrogations in a Beijing security facility, the artist and dissident Ai Weiwei began to write what would become 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrow:. His tough, implacable interrogator had informed him that there was a price to pay for every word he uttered. “During the Cultural Revolution, you could have been shot a hundred times over.” That night, he realised he had never asked his father, the celebrated but persecuted poet Ai Qing, what he had gone through during the Cultural Revolution; it was now too late. He decided to write so that his son would never have the same regret.