Left: ko ko thett at an exhibition of Chinese semizdat poetry books at Shanghai Minsheng Arts Museum, where he read in November 2015. Photo by Victor Shen.
We don’t choose the world we are born into. Or the nation. As valuable as theories of the social contract may be — the idea that we chose to relinquish the freedom of unfettered existence for the security of a lawful society — the fact remains that no one in our world has ever actually confronted that choice. It’s not a contract we can annul.[1]
