In a comedic novel set during this period, the protagonist claims he can only disprove his affair by proving either his lover was a virgin or he was born without a penis. For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this historical period, which provides the setting of a novel in which two boys read Balzac and fall in love with a local seamstress.
ANSWER: Cultural Revolution (The novels are Wang Xiaobo’s Golden Age and Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.)
[10h] Liu Lan realizes she has a fetish for destroying icons of Mao in this author’s 2005 novel Serve the People!. This author created a town that becomes a tourist destination for Lenin’s corpse in the novel Lenin’s Kisses.
ANSWER: Yan Lianke
[10e] Wandering Zhou sells fake hymens at the National Virgin Beauty Competition in Yu Hua’s Cultural Revolution novel titled for these people. Three men swear to be these people to each other in the Oath of the Peach Garden.
ANSWER: brothers [or Xiōngdì] (The second clue references Romance of the Three Kingdoms.)
<CM, World Literature>