{"title":"Our Ferocious Self-Doubt","authors":"Yanmei Zhang, Yingying Huang","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1750880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750880","url":null,"abstract":"Xu Zechen has been acclaimed as the “best writer born in the 1970s” in China. In this interview by literary critic Zhang Xiumei, Xu talks about his works, in particular his novel Jerusalem, the fiction writing of other ’70s generation Chinese writers, and his view of literature in general. Some key concepts in his fiction, such as the “world” and the hometown, are discussed in connection with notions about history, religion, spiritual search, and growth. Xu conceives of his fiction writing as a means to answer questions, and one central question he seeks to answer concerns the origin and destination of life as a never-ending journey.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"33 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750880","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42651376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Floating Life","authors":"Kai-cheung Dung, Andrea Lingenfelter","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1750839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750839","url":null,"abstract":"This excerpt is Part Two of Hong Kong novelist Dung Kai-Cheung’s 2018 novel Beloved Wife. Part One is told from the point of view of Seh Zi Yin, a university professor, and begins with Seh seeing off his wife, Lung Yuk Man, at the airport as she begins a sabbatical year at Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Part One describes Seh’s life in his wife’s absence, including his encounters with a mysterious foreigner who is researching technology that will allow for the duplication, uploading, storage, and downloading of human consciousness. Part Two, composed entirely of dialogue between Seh and his wife, turns Seh’s world on its head. Dung’s novel, inspired in part by Ghost in the Shell, is at once the story of a marriage and a philosophical exploration of what it means to be human.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"14 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750839","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45980023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"NO POETRY: Selected Poems of Che Qianzi","authors":"Simon Schuchat","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1750897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750897","url":null,"abstract":"Che Qianzi 车前子 is a delightful, powerful and restless poet. NO POETRY (Wu shige: che qianzi shixuan 无诗歌: 车前子诗选), ably translated by Yunte Huang, is a welcome introduction to Che’s varied poetic practice. A Beijing resident originally from Suzhou, Che is well-known in China for his painting and prose, as well as his poetry; he is a fully modern traditional scholar-artist. Indeed, he has claimed himself to be the reincarnation of the Yuan dynasty poet Yang Weizhen 杨维桢 (c. 1296–1370). One might consider his forays into “concrete poetry” a contemporary form of the traditional “poetry in painting, painting in poetry” although they can just as easily be affiliated to Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams. Some critics have linked his work to that of the American LANGUAGE poets, but Che’s universe is broader than merely contemporary American or Chinese classical traditions. His diagram poem “Sign: Inspired by a Letter” (“Fu: zimu chanshengde lianxiang”符: 字母产生的联想) recalls, for instance, similar work by Moscow Conceptualist Andrei Monastrysky. Such is the breadth of Che’s cosmopolitan modernity. Nevertheless, while interested in words as things, he does not seek to defeat the communicability of his language, which is a good thing, inasmuch as his writing maintains its translatability despite the very different physical and aural nature of Chinese and English words. It is evident that Che does not want to write the same poem twice. It is hard to say what a “typical Che poem” would be. His lyrics are sometimes sharp and enigmatic, such as “Impromptu”:","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"103 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750897","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44281479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fiction and Fieldwork","authors":"M. Berry","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1750895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750895","url":null,"abstract":"Remains of Life is a contemporary Chinese novel from Taiwan originally published in 1999 and in English in 2017. Written by Wu He (penname of Chen Guocheng), the novel explores the historical memory of the 1930 Musha Incident, which was a violent conflict between members of the Seediq people and the Japanese colonizers. This interview with Wu He by the novel’s English translator examines the novel’s origins, the writing process, the unique structure and form of the book, and the author’s reflections on the Musha Incident.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"102 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750895","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41367060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The City as the Protagonist","authors":"Xu Zechen, Xu Shiyan","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1750850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750850","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explains why Xu Zechen, a writer who lived for eighteen years in the countryside, decided to take the city as the protagonist of his fiction. He does not have the confidence to effectively present the countryside in the form of fiction because he was not born in the countryside. No matter how hard he tries, he can never follow the tradition created by the Chinese writers born in the 1950s, who excel at writing about the countryside. Although urban literature has always been marginalized in contemporary Chinese literature, Xu would still painstakingly make a way of his own to write about Beijing, the city he is living in. After writing several novels on Beijing, the city has become the standpoint from which he views the world.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"28 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750850","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41900690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Gray Kilns","authors":"Jing Li, Ping Zhu","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1750887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750887","url":null,"abstract":"“The Gray Kilns” (“Hui yaodi”) was written in September 1989, and was published in Tianjin Literature in 1990. The novella is based on the author Li Jing’s real-life story when she was a rusticated youth in Heilongjiang Province in North China between 1969 and 1976. The story revolves around the intimate “friendship” between two female rusticated youths: Lan Rubing and Hong Jingyuan. The same-sex intimacy they shared formed a temporary haven of escape from taxing manual labor. To this date, scholars have viewed Chen Ran’s 1991 story “The Birth of a Hollow Man” (“Kongxin ren de dansheng”) as the first literary work on same-sex relationships produced in mainland China, but the publication of Li Jing’s “The Gray Kilns” precedes Chen Ran’s story by one year. Li Jing’s narrative voice is delicate, vivid, reflective, and visceral, offering the readers a unique account of a forgotten part of history. In 1997, Li Jing and her twin sister, Li Ying, developed “The Gray Kilns” into a full-length novel named Sunken Snow (Chenxue), which won the Taiwan United Daily (Lianhe bao) Literary Award for Novel-length Fiction in the same year.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"60 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750887","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48562318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Affair","authors":"Isaac (Shuntang) Hsu, Tze-lan Sang","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1750838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750838","url":null,"abstract":"“The Affair,” by Isaac (Shuntang) Hsu, is the recipient of the 1988 top China Times Science Fiction Award in Taiwan. Among Taiwanese sci-fi fans and critics, Isaac Hsu is known as the only author whose work contributed to the golden era of sci-fi literature in Taiwan and who is still active today. He is especially acclaimed for creating fictional universes based on concrete scientific theories and rigorous speculations. “The Affair” is a short story that deals with poignant questions of morality and humanity raised by the development of artificial intelligence. The underlying concept of the story strongly resonates with that of Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.” Daneel Lynn, a well-known Taiwanese sci-fi critic, has remarked that Hsu is the only Taiwanese writer who has produced sci-fi stories that are in close agreement with Asimov’s Robots series. He has even observed that “The Affair” presented a concept very similar to Asimov’s Zeroth law of Robotics no later than Asimov himself did. “The Affair” is the first story in Hsu’s Hamlet Trilogy, which explores the concept of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité as it pertains to the interactions between humans and artificial intelligence. The final story in the trilogy, “The Farewell of Roba,” has recently appeared in Hsu’s new sci-fi collection, Puppet Blood and Other Stories (Kuilei xielei ji qita gushi) from Gaea Books Co., Ltd.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"13 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750838","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48070795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Brothers","authors":"Zechen Xu, Natascha Bruce","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1750882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750882","url":null,"abstract":"First published in Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo Yuebao) in 2018, “Brothers” is a story about the search for identity and kinship in a city working at breakneck speed to “clean up” and redevelop. Dai Shanchuan arrives in Beijing convinced that there is another “him” somewhere in the city—not a brother or a lookalike, but a long-lost version of himself. As he wanders the alleys looking for this other Dai Shanchuan, Beijing is being radically transformed around him: traditional courtyard houses are bulldozed and extreme restrictions placed on the activity of informal migrant workers. Unable to go about business as usual, and bored out of their minds, the workers have split into factions and engage in increasingly violent battles to pass the time.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"52 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1750882","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46647851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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