Literature

posts related to modern and contemporary Chinese Literature

Peace and Love poetry reading (1)

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On December 31, I participated in a New Year’s  Eve and New Year’s Day poetry marathon on the internet in Chinese and other languages, hosted by the poet 桉予 An Yu. Altogether 300 poets reading over 24 hours. One section  was devoted to poets from Ukraine. An Yu has now been circulating video recordings of readings from this section on WeChat, under the title Real Tiktok Refugees. I have seen reports from Ukraine and even online anthologies of poetry from Ukraine censored on WeChat, but for now, these voices are there to be heard and seen. It is a diverse selection, maybe as diverse as possible in this situation.

Real TikTok refugees – Ukrainian section of New Year poetry readings on the Chinese internet: Introduction and nine poets reading their works, along with translations.
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ifq5ZTOPY7c0d4eemiJr7g

Real TikTok refugees, part 2: Ten more poets reading their works, along with translations
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jG7IN-2rH-nkApXSW4FGeg

Martin Winter 维马丁

The Anaconda in the Chandelier review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeffrey Kinkley’s review of The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China, by Perry Link. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kinkley2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Anaconda in the Chandelier:
Writings on China

By Perry Link

Reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Perry Link, The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China Perry Link. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2025. viii + 287 pp. ISBN 9781589881983 (paper)

Perry Link’s eminence as scholar and as public intellectual is well known to most MCLC readers. His pioneering scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese popular narratives and on the linguistic inventiveness of Chinese oral and written expression more generally is embodied in full-length monographs,[1] supplemented by studies of the circulation of Mao-era printed novels and unapproved hand-copied manuscripts, as well as essays on comedians’ dialogues (xiangsheng 相声) of the Mao and post-Mao years. Link’s 2007 essay on xiangsheng in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) serves as a bang-up penultimate chapter for The Anaconda in the Chandelier.[2] The book prints in total thirty-one of Link’s 1998-2023 short and medium-length essays, book reviews, and prefaces, including a number of Link’s longer and more academic articles, together with their footnotes. Most are reprints—with revisions, says the preface, but changes are scarcely visible. Many of these contributions take on the dark task of explaining the finely tuned mechanics, psychology, and social psychology of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of Chinese communication through censorship, pre-censorship, and, above all, the creation of an unconscious, second-nature self-censorship among writers and the general public. Link calls the condition “fossilized fear.” That was the subject of a landmark monograph from Princeton University Press he published in 2000—on the “uses” of literature in China.[3] He updated the story in newsy and learned essays published in The New York Review of Books and various op-ed and human rights forums. (NYRB-related contributions make up about half of the essays anthologized in The Anaconda in the Chandelier.) The author’s expertise, Chinese friends and informants, and ever-critical yet always humanely empathetic social probings enabled what is probably now his best-known research: historical and biographical accounts of Chinese dissidence and protest. That focus, too, dates back to the 1980s, when he began to translate, edit, and publish short fiction and essays by freethinking PRC writers who surfaced, or, like Liu Binyan 刘宾雁, resurfaced, after the demise of Mao.[4] Consideration of the 1989 June Fourth massacre accelerated Link’s major collaborative academic projects and human rights activism, which includes documenting and explaining the before-and-after of China’s nationwide 1989 calamity, the Charter 08 movement, and the life story of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波.[5] Through it all, Link has pursued yet another vocation: teaching in and administering Chinese language programs, while coproducing textbooks for them.[6] Continue reading The Anaconda in the Chandelier review →

Disoriented Disciplines review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Carles Prado-Fonts’ review of Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, by Rosario Hubert. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/prado-fonts/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Disoriented Disciplines: China,
Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature

By Rosario Hubert

Reviewed by Carles Prado-Fonts

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Rosario Hubert, Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023. 328 pp. ISBN 9780810146556 (paperback); 9780810146563 (hardcover); 9780810146570 (ebook).

The study of Sinographies, or “the particular forms of writing that produce and convey (within China as well as without it) the meanings of China,”[1] has become a meeting point where scholarship from Chinese studies, historiography, and comparative literature merge and interact in productive ways. To be sure, these studies differ depending on each scholar’s background, as well as on their scope and concerns. But, as a whole, they form a field that has now already gone a long way since its original formulation, which mostly covered writings about China in hegemonic Western contexts. The pioneering works of Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot, Christopher Bush, and a few others have now been enlarged, supplemented, and problematized from new angles and new linguistic perspectives, as well as with the aid of archives.

The study of Sinographies in Latin America is an excellent example of such fertile evolution. The past few years have seen a wide array of contributions that study the meanings of “China” in Latin America. Works by scholars such as Araceli Tinajero, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Ignacio López Calvo, and Kathleen López have recently been expanded in new directions by contributions from Andrea Bachner, Monica DeHart, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Ana Paulina Lee, Jorge Locane, Maria Montt Strabucchi, Brenda Rupar, and Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, among many others.[2] Thus, while a common trope in prefaces and introductions may still claim that China in Latin America is a new and under-researched topic, the fact is that solid scholarship already exists about it—in Spanish and English. The future also looks promising: not only because there is a massive archive that has not yet been fully explored, but also because of the theoretical potential of these discoveries to come. As a “South-South” interaction that escapes the logic of hegemonic scholarship, the study of China in Latin America can raise pertinent critical questions in discussions about truly global and transnational issues. Continue reading Disoriented Disciplines review →

Ling Yü wins 2025 Newman Prize

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NORMAN, OKLA. – An international jury has selected Taiwanese poet Ling Yü 零⾬ (Wang Meiqin 王美琴) as the winner of the 2025 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Sponsored by the University of Oklahoma Institute for US-China Issues in the David L. Boren College of International Studies, the Newman Prize is awarded biennially to recognize outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, based solely on literary merit. Any living author writing in Chinese is eligible.

Ling Yü will receive $10,000 and an engraved bronze medallion. She will be celebrated at an award symposium and banquet to be held on the OU Norman campus during the last week of March 2025 along with the winners of the International Newman Prizes for English Jueju.

Ling Yü was nominated for the prize by Professor Cosima Bruno (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), who praised her poetry for its “untrammeled, ingenious lyricism” and its ability to weave contemporary themes and personal experiences with the controlled elegance of classical Chinese poetry.

Bruno remarked in her nomination statement:

Ling Yü’s language is economical and concise, yet surprising and reverberating with complex meaning. Her poetry engages thoughtfully with classical and modern, Eastern and Western literary, philosophical, artistic, and esoteric sources, generating outstanding works that require attention but are also intuitively grasped. Through her works, readers encounter a prism of rich, elegantly employed references that span themes of meditation, travel, feminism, capitalism, the environment, mythology and more.

Ling Yü’s extensive body of work includes nine collections of poetry, such as Series on a City (《城的連作》1990), Names Disappearing on the Map (《消失在地圖上的名字》1992), Mudong Hymns (《⽊冬詠歌集》1999), I’m Heading for You (《我正前往你》2010), and her recent collections Skin-Coloured Time (《膚⾊的時光》2018) and Daughters (《女兒》2022). Her poetry spans topics such as cultural heritage, mythological figures, ecological concern, and autobiographical reflection. Her work has been widely recognized, translated into multiple languages, and presented at major international poetry festivals, including the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam and the Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. Continue reading Ling Yü wins 2025 Newman Prize →

Paper Republic 2024 Roll Call

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2024 Roll-Call of Chinese Literature in English Translation
By Jack Hargreaves, published 

‘Tis the end of 2024 (Where it’s gone? Don’t ask me.) and that means it’s time for the annual roll-call of Chinese-language literature published in English translation.

It has been a mixed year, with, on the plus side, there being more women authors published than in 2023, and just more works of fiction in general — more prizewinning works of fiction, too.

But there does seem to be less poetry. And when I say there are more works by women than there has been, the increase isn’t dramatic. In fact, you might say that this year is, on the whole, a return to business as usual after the post-Covid years — those weren’t fallow years, but they were lower yield.

Still, it’s a really exciting list of titles which includes some of my favourite reads from 2024, full-stop. I’m also confident that we’ve missed some works out, especially when it comes to poetry, so please do drop any absent titles in the comments below and we’ll make sure to add them. The same goes for any particularly glowing reviews you’ve come across, or prize announcements (we’ve mostly included winners, but please also share any shortlisted or longlisted works).

Special mentions go to translators Jennifer Feeley and Lin King for bringing us five showstoppers between them, with Mourning a Breast and Tongueless, and Taiwan Travelogue, Cloud Labour and book two of The Boy From Clearwater, respectively. Continue reading Paper Republic 2024 Roll Call →

Prism 21.1

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Prism (Volume 21, Number 1, 2024)
Guest edited by Ban Wang and Haomin Gong

Culture, Nature, and Environmental Humanities: An Introduction
By Ban Wang

TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL WISDOM

Dog Has No Buddha Nature: The Compulsion for Meaning, Nihilphobia, and Chan Therapy in the Anthropocene End-Time
By Chia-Ju Chang

The Life of Urban(e) Waters: Kyoto, circa 1830
By Stephen Roddy

ETHNICITY, PLACE, AND BORDER

“Natural” Disasters and Disaster Relief: Ecoethnic Politics in Alai’s Epic of Ji Village
By Huaji Xu; Haomin Gong

Mu Dan’s Encounter with Nature: The Phantasmic, the Metaphysical, and the Lyrical
By Qiongqiong Ye; Haomin Gong

Greenwashing, Simulated Green, and Beyond: Yi-fu Tuan and His Embodied Simulation of Habitats
By Xinmin Liu

Flood Dashing against the Temple of the Dragon King: The Allegorical Nature in Wind from the East (1959)
By Zhen Zhang

The Logic of the Void: Translation, Indigeneity, and Islands in Taiwanese Ecological Fiction
By Robin Visser

SCIENCE FICTION AND ECOCRITICISM

Inventing Climate Change: Nature and Nation in Late Qing Chinese Science Fiction
By Cheng Li

Ecology, (Post)Humanism, and Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem
By Melissa A. Hosek

Future Emotions and Senses: Chen Qiufan’s Science Fiction of the Anthropocene
By Kiu-Wai Chu

Indifference as Alienation in Chen Qiufan’s Science Fiction Waste Tide
By Yuanyuan Hua; Yunfan Zhang

Ecological Utopia and Dystopia in Chinese Science Fiction
By Ban Wang

Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award (2)

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The Prince Claus Fund web page on Mu Cao includes a beautiful short video on Mu Cao, made by the Fund in September 2024 and first shown during the award ceremony for this year’s Prince Claus Impact Awards: https://edu.nl/wj6y4. (The video is right below the photo at the top; the play button is not clearly visible, but it sits in the middle of the burgundy rectangle.) In the video, Mu Cao explains what writing means to him. Below the video, there’s a brief profile of the poet in English.

Crossing, a book produced by the Prince Claus Fund on the occasion of the 2024 Impact Awards, includes laudations for each of the six laureates. After Mu Cao was nominated (in 2023), the Fund approached me for information on his life and work, to support the jury as it made its way from close to two hundred nominees to six awardees. In this capacity I had the privilege of writing the laudation for Mu Cao, for which I drew on an essay I co-authored with Hongwei Bao that is forthcoming in 2025. The text of the laudation is below.

Maghiel van Crevel

MU CAO: AN INIMITABLE VOICE
In Crossing (Amsterdam: Prince Claus Fund, 2024): 96-98.

Mu Cao is a poet and fiction writer whose life and work defy social convention in every respect. He is the author of a literary oeuvre that has emerged against the odds, carried by an inimitable voice that blends indignation and imagination to address a fiercely personal experience as well as overarching issues of social justice.

Born and raised in a village in rural China, Mu Cao was expelled from school at age fifteen and has since sustained himself with precarious labor, mostly in Zhengzhou and Beijing. One of three hundred million labor migrants who have flocked from the Chinese countryside to the cities since the 1980s, he has held dozens of jobs, from assembly line worker to web salesperson and from noodle-maker to barbershop attendant. Living on a shoestring, he works in order to save money so he can quit and write. When the money runs out, he looks for work again. Continue reading Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award (2) →

Qiong Yao dies in apparent suicide

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Source: BBC News (12/4/24)
Top Chinese language novelist dies in apparent suicide
By Fan Wang, BBC News

Getty Images Chiung Yao attends a press conference on July 10, 2007 in Taipei.

Getty Images

Chiung Yao [瓊瑤], arguably the world’s most popular Chinese language romance novelist, has died in an apparent suicide.

The 86-year-old’s body was found in her home in New Taipei City on Wednesday, local media report. Emergency services said she took her own life, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency.

Chiung Yao started writing at 18 and published more than 60 novels, many of which were adapted into movies and TV series and remained popular for decades.

She was also a successful screenwriter and producer. One of her most famous works was the TV drama My Fair Princess, which launched the careers of big name stars.

She was born Chen Che in Sichuan, China in 1938. Chiung Yao is her pen name.

A post on her Facebook account on Wednesday read: “Goodbye, my loved ones. I feel lucky that I have met and known you in this life”. It was not immediately clear if the post was published before or after her body was found. Continue reading Qiong Yao dies in apparent suicide →

Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award

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Chinese poet and fiction writer Mu Cao 墓草 (1974) has received one of the 2024 Prince Claus Impact Awards, as one of six biennial laureates in art and cultural practice worldwide (https://edu.nl/x8bjf). The Prince Claus Fund is an independent foundation dedicated to culture and development. The Impact Awards honor groundbreaking artists and cultural practitioners whose work inspires positive social change. The 2024 laureates received their awards on 3 December in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Mu Cao is known as China’s first openly gay poet. He is also one of China’s earliest migrant worker poets (aka battler poets 打工诗人) and writes with uncompromising candor on life on the underside, in his poetry and his fiction alike. Both queerness and socioeconomic inequality count as sensitive topics in China and Mu Cao has only published through unofficial channels there. An official, two-volume survey anthology of his poetry and short fiction came out in Taiwan in 2023 (https://edu.nl/fdg79). Five books of his poetry and two multiple-author anthologies produced under his editorship can be freely accessed at the Leiden University Library digital collection of unofficial poetry from China (https://edu.nl/k4d4d).

For scholarship, media, and translations on/of Mu Cao’s work, see the MCLC Resource Center bibliographies on literary studies: Author studies > M (https://u.osu.edu/mclc/h-q/#M) and Translations (author) > M (https://edu.nl/q6qc6).

Posted by: Maghiel van Crevel

Taiwan novel makes history winning National Book Award

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Source: Radio Taiwan International (11/21/24)
Taiwan novel makes history winning US National Book Award
By Amanda Ruth Stephens

Taiwan novel makes history winning US National Book Award

Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi’s “Taiwan Travelogue ” won the U.S. National Book Award Wednesday. In her acceptance speech reflecting on the theme of Taiwanese identity, she said, “[I] wrote about the past to move on to the future.” (Photo via YT/@NationalBook)

The English translation of the novel Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄) made history Wednesday as the first Taiwanese novel to win the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature since the award was founded in 1967. The award is among one of the most prestigious literature awards in the world, mentioned alongside the Man Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature.

Written by author Yang Shuang-zi (楊双子), the book tells the story of a Japanese travel writer Chizuko, and her Taiwanese translator Chizuru traveling along Taiwan’s railway system on a “culinary journey” during the period of Japanese occupation. During the journey, Chizuko is faced with confronting the layered power dynamics in an intimate story that the New York Times praises as “a nesting-doll narrative about colonial power in its many forms[…] of translations, [and] of empires”.

The author, Yang Shuang-zi, is actually a pen name for twin sisters Yang Jo-tzu (楊若慈) and Yang Jo-hui (楊若暉) who worked as collaborators focusing on narrative creation, and historical research and translation. While Yang Jo-hui passed away in 2015, her sister has continued to use the pen name in her honor. Continue reading Taiwan novel makes history winning National Book Award →

Affordances of the Sinophone Literary Translator

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Symposium on the Affordances of the Sinophone Literary Translator

With a keynote address by Michael Berry and masterclasses by Nicky Harman, Jennifer Feeley, Christopher Rea, Anna Gustafsson Chen, and Gigi Chang, a hybrid-mode symposium will be held on the affordances of Sinophone literary translation at M+ in Hong Kong on 13-14 December.

Webpage: https://shorturl.at/6cWCr
Registration: https://shorturl.at/lSt0Q

All are welcome, but please register whether you’re attending in person or online.

Posted by: Darryl Sterk <shidailun@gmail.com>

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere

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Dear all,

I am pleased to announce Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is published today. I hope you find the book useful in your teaching and research. Book information below.

Thank you and all the best,

Hongwei Bao <renebao@gmail.com>

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere
(edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Ma, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. 296pp. ISBN: 9781350415331)

Description

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is the most up-to-date English-language study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) themed literature and culture in the Chinese-speaking world. From classical homoerotic texts to contemporary boys’ love fan fiction, this book showcases the richness and diversity of queer Chinese literature across the full spectrum of genres, styles, topics and cultural politics. The book features authors and literary works from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the global Chinese diaspora. Featuring chapters by leading scholars from around the world, this book This book charts a new queer literary history in non-Western, non-Anglophone and Global South contexts. Continue reading Queer Literature in the Sinosphere →

The Boom & the Boom

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Dear MCLC colleagues,

I am delighted to share to share my recently published monograph: The Boom & The Boom: Historical Rupture and Political Economy in Contemporary British and Chinese Science Fiction (Peter Lang, 2024).

Description:

The Boom & The Boom compares the recent science fiction renaissances in the UK and China, known as the British and Chinese SF Booms, both having emerged in the late 1980s. The author contextualizes the two booms within the transformative political and cultural histories of both countries, characterized by the politico-economic shifts initiated by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. In an era marked by the state’s retreat from society and the redefinition of social subjects through market competition, science fiction assumes a crucial counter position for cultural critique, envisioning alternatives and possibilities embodied in utopian hopes.

Emphasizing the “local” rather than the “global” nature of science fiction, The Boom & The Boom interrogates how Boom writers in the UK and China respond to specific sociopolitical conditions in their respective regions. It contends that the British SF Boom serves as a political platform for left-wing writers against Thatcherite politics, seeking alternatives to capitalist realism. In contrast, the Chinese Boom, influenced by the rise of a mass public, grapples with a sense of doubleness, blending futuristic visions of non-capitalist alternatives with collective trauma from the past shaped by Dengist reforms. Only through this comparative lens can we come closer to understanding the “hyperobject” that has given rise to both Thatcherism and post-socialism. Continue reading The Boom & the Boom →

One Man Talking review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Charles Laughlin’s review of One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939, edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/laughlin/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

One Man Talking: Selected Essays
of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939

By Shao Xunmei
Edited and Translated Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala

Reviewed by Charles Laughlin
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2024)

Shao Xunmei, One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939 Edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2023. 454 pp. ISBN: 978-9629376604 (paper).

Over the past quarter century, there has been growing scholarly attention to Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906-1968), initially as a poet, but increasingly as a publisher and cultural figure. One chapter of Leo Ou-fan Lee’s 1999 book Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, introduces Shao as a decadent poet alongside the “dandy” Ye Lingfeng 葉靈鳳, but also devotes space to his important role in the publishing industry.[1] In 2001, Jonathan Hutt published an article entitled “La Maison d’Or: The Sumptuous World of Shao Xunmei.” In 2016, Jicheng Sun and Harold Swindall published a collection of Shao’s poetry in English translation, The Verse of Shao Xunmei. More recently, in 2020, is Tian Jin’s critical study of Shao’s poetry, The Condition of Music: Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei.

Parallel to this increased attention to Shao’s poetry, Paul Bevan has published extensively on Western impacts on Republican era print culture with a particular emphasis on illustrated magazines, and these works have fleshed out Shao Xunmei’s broader profile as a cultural figure. In 2018, Bevan published a monograph on Shao Xunmei’s Modern Miscellany (時代畫報), and in 2020 he brought out “Intoxicating Shanghai”—An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines in Shanghai’s Jazz Age, a broader study on pictorial magazines based in Shanghai and their contributing artists. Bevan has also published a journal article on Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias’ momentous encounter with 1930s Shanghai and his impact on its visual print culture (2021), and more recently a book chapter on Shao’s bookshop The Golden House and his relationship with translation (2024), both of which overlap with the content of One Man Talking. One Man Talking can thus be seen as a collection of source materials on Shao Xunmei that supplements Bevan’s research on Shao and his milieu, that establishes Shao as a cultural figure using his own (prose) voice. This effort is aided by the editors’ collaboration with Shao’s daughter Shao Xiaohong, who provided valuable materials, including an essay on Shao’s wartime publication efforts, and to whose memory the book is dedicated. The book also features a foreword by Leo Ou-fan Lee, translations and commentary by co-editor Susan Daruvala, Michel Hockx, Helen Wang, and Sun Xinqi. Continue reading One Man Talking review →