A Feast of China’s Contemporary Literature
21st Century Chinese Literature
Editors: Li Jingze, Shi Zhanjun
Price: RMB 118 each (9 volumes in total)
Published by Foreign Languages Press
CHINESE literature has experienced a surge in popularity over the past two years and has caught the attention of book lovers across the world. Works by Chinese writers like Mo Yan, Bi Feiyu, Mai Jia, Li Er, and Xu Zechen have won a large following of foreign readers.
Best known for his literary criticism, Li Jingze has a deep understanding of China’s contemporary writers. Different from past generations of writers since the May 4 Movement of 1919, they write under the supposition that foreigners are among their potential readers, and hence from a global perspective.
As deputy chair of the Chinese Writers’ Association, Li has compiled a selection of Chinese contemporary literature, published as a series especially for global readers. This literary feast includes articles from leading literature periodicals, newspaper supplements, and national publications printed around the year 2000 with different themes, genres, and writing styles, all selected by senior scholars and critics. Nine books are included in the series: The Sugar Blower, Irina’s Hat, A Voice from the Beyond, The Last Subway, Shadow People, Keep Running, Little Brother, Sweetgrass Barracks, To The Goat-Dipping, and Fragment of A Memory from 1970.
All works have been translated by native English speakers. The series aims to reflect China’s contemporary social changes, interpersonal relations, and individual emotions, and to display the features and development trends of 21st century Chinese literature.
As their international outlook expands, however, the authors seek to break the convention of perceiving China from a typical Western perspective, a device once popular among some Chinese writers and artists in efforts to win over Western readers.
In this way, the series aims to overturn the stereotyped images that the Western world has of the Chinese imagination.
The Last Subway focuses on “the city” to evoke metropolitan life. The contributors live in major cities in China and tell stories about their homes. They provide readers with urban images in a polygon prism: from narrow alleys, age-old hutong and courtyards, to the modern developed districts bursting with life. The multi-dimensional literature perspective helps readers to discover people’s innate sentiments, the hidden charm and dynamism of modern cities, and the fickleness of human nature.
Keep Running, Little Brother focuses on “speed.” The book includes short stories by renowned authors Wang Anyi and Bi Feiyu, and some from the new generation of young writers, to express people’s understanding of changes over time and of the living conditions of people in a fast-developing world.
Shadow People centers on the topic of “the future.” Works from famous writer Han Shaogong and Chinese science fiction pioneer Liu Cixin are included. The perspective vacillates between China’s rural and urban backdrops, between catching up with world trends and striding into the future and embracing all possibilities.
Among the selected works, the richness of literary creation sources is another topic Li focuses on.
It is predicted that 300 to 400 million rural residents will become urban citizens by 2020. In contrast, the similar rural-to-urban migration in Western countries took almost 100 years to complete. From the early 1990s to the present day, half of all Chinese rural areas completed their urbanization drives with unprecedented speed and scale. This formidable transformation, as can be imagined, was paved with moving stories steeped in spiritual undertones.
Selections in the book Irina’s Hat are masterpieces by women writers, whose fertile imaginations and stories connect with the times.
Tie Ning is a representative woman writer in Chinese contemporary literature circles. Her works have won six national literature awards, including the Lu Xun Literature Prize, and 30 or more prizes from China’s leading literary magazines. Her representative work Oh, Xiangxue was made into a film that won an award at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival and two Chinese film awards – the Gold Rooster Award and the Hundred Flowers Award. Some of her works have been translated into multiple languages including English, Russian, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and Vietnamese.
Irina’s Hat won her the People’s Literature Award for short stories in 2009. The first person narrative is used to depict the account of the storyteller and an acquaintance, Irina, on an airplane during a 10-day journey in Russia. It seems like a common travel tale at first, but goes on to successfully portray Irina’s complicated psyche. The readers’ observations through the voice of the narrator create a situation in which they, together with the author, discover the character’s destiny, revealing her innate psychology. Tie skillfully narrates the character’s inner feelings as well as her extrinsic personality.
Through this literary series, Li demonstrates what a huge feat it is to tell Chinese stories from a global perspective and present to the world the true China in transition.
