I noticed this book review in today’s NYT (hat tip: Richard).   Kang Zhengguo’s memoir is titled, Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China.  The review describes him thusly:

Dreamy, lazy, romantic, stubborn and impulsive, Mr. Kang spelled
trouble from the start. He was not a dissident in the normal sense, but
a determined individualist and a goof-off, seemingly intent on working
against his own best interests, which is what makes “Memoirs” [sic] such a
mesmerizing read.

 If you took out the "stubborn" (can Taoists be stubborn?), this sounds like something right out of the Tao Te Ching:

…People all have enough and more
But I’m abandoned and destitute,
an absolute simpleton, this mind of mine so utterly
muddled and blank.

Others are bright and clear:
I’m dark and murky.
Others are confident and effective:
I’m pensive and withdrawn,
uneasy as boundless seas
or perennial mountain winds.

People all have a purpose in life,
but I’m inept, thoroughly useless and backward.
I’ll never be like other people:
I keep to the nurturing mother.

    Passage 20

     Perhaps that doesn’t fit him perfectly, but you get the idea.  That sense of uniqueness, and the challenge it posed for the hyper-conformity of Maoist China, has a "wandering boundless and free" (title of chapter one of Chuang Tzu) quality about it:

Like a character in a picaresque novel, Mr. Kang stumbles from one
misadventure to the next, his big mouth and relaxed habits ensuring
disaster at every turn. City, country, prison—he covers it all. The
confessions pile up, his dossier swells, and even China begins to look
too small to accommodate him. All he wants, really, is a quiet place to
curl up and read a book, and a few notebooks to write in. The party
won’t allow it.

     While we’re thinking of Chuang Tzu, here is how he describes people who embrace Way and "wander beyond this realm we know:"

On loan from everything else, they’ll soon be entrusted back to the one body. Forgetting liver and gallbladder, abandoning ears and eyes, they’ll continue on again, tumbling and twirling through a blur of endings and beginnings.  They roam at ease beyond the tawdry dust of this world, wander without themselves, boundless and free through the selfless unfolding of things.  So why would they fuss and stew about the rituals and customs of this human world?  Just to put on a show for the rest of us? (95)

     I wonder if that is how Kang survived his encounters with the powers that be?

    It should be mentioned, however, that there is an obvious way in which Kang does not really fit a Taoist description: he obviously writes well, and thus has an eloquence about him that might confound a strict interpretation of Taoist virtues….