The Chinese obsession with wall has grown almost out of proportion and has become intellectually complicated, so much so that the intellectual antenna of Franz Kafka has caught it from afar. During the building of the wall and ever since to this very day I have occupied myself almost exclusively with the comparative history of races--there are certain questions which one can probe to the marrow, as it were, only by this method--and I have discovered that we Chinese possess certain folk and political institutions that are unique in their clarity, others again unique in their obscurity. The desire to trace the cause of these phenomena, especially the latter, has always intrigued me and intrigues me still, and the building of the wall is itself essentially involved with these problems." (Franz, Kafka, The Great Wall of China. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. p.91).
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