Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990693
Yingzi Hu
This essay introduces the author Xue Yiwei and his Traveling with Marco Polo, a creative collection that dialogues with Invisible Cities by the postmodern Italian writer Italo Calvino. While Calvino imagines a young Marco Polo describing the fantastic sights of fifty-five cities to an aging Kublai Khan, Xue Yiwei joins the conversation and provides a meticulous explication of each one of Calvino’s cities. Furthermore, Traveling with Marco Polo expands the imaginary cityscapes to include oblique commentaries on the past, present, and future of China as well as the profound meditation on the city as a microcosm of our world. The result is a daring literary experiment that is representative of Xue’s oeuvre overall: at once giving a powerful literary representation of modern Chinese history while engaging in dialogue with writers from all over the world.
{"title":"Dialoguing with the World: Xue Yiwei and His Traveling with Marco Polo","authors":"Yingzi Hu","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990693","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990693","url":null,"abstract":"This essay introduces the author Xue Yiwei and his Traveling with Marco Polo, a creative collection that dialogues with Invisible Cities by the postmodern Italian writer Italo Calvino. While Calvino imagines a young Marco Polo describing the fantastic sights of fifty-five cities to an aging Kublai Khan, Xue Yiwei joins the conversation and provides a meticulous explication of each one of Calvino’s cities. Furthermore, Traveling with Marco Polo expands the imaginary cityscapes to include oblique commentaries on the past, present, and future of China as well as the profound meditation on the city as a microcosm of our world. The result is a daring literary experiment that is representative of Xue’s oeuvre overall: at once giving a powerful literary representation of modern Chinese history while engaging in dialogue with writers from all over the world.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"33 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44698089","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990679
Yiwei Xue, Stephen Nashef
“Secretary Girl” is a piece that is featured in the short story collection Shenzheners, although it is one of the three titles that was not included in the English translation. As such, this is the first time it has appeared in English. It tells the story of a woman who grows up in a small town in China where she works as an English teacher before moving to a big southern city. A snapshot of modern China told through the experience of one woman, it touches upon many contrasts that characterize the country today, from the young protagonist’s fond memories of her father who was an active participant in Maoist China to the question of how the developing culture of the country’s new commercial cities affects arrivals from smaller interior towns. As with many of Xue Yiwei’s works, it is an eloquent and insightful account of both the personal and the historical, and moreover how they interact.
{"title":"Secretary Girl","authors":"Yiwei Xue, Stephen Nashef","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990679","url":null,"abstract":"“Secretary Girl” is a piece that is featured in the short story collection Shenzheners, although it is one of the three titles that was not included in the English translation. As such, this is the first time it has appeared in English. It tells the story of a woman who grows up in a small town in China where she works as an English teacher before moving to a big southern city. A snapshot of modern China told through the experience of one woman, it touches upon many contrasts that characterize the country today, from the young protagonist’s fond memories of her father who was an active participant in Maoist China to the question of how the developing culture of the country’s new commercial cities affects arrivals from smaller interior towns. As with many of Xue Yiwei’s works, it is an eloquent and insightful account of both the personal and the historical, and moreover how they interact.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"15 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48861877","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990695
H. Xiao
In recent years, over 35 million female migrant workers have left their families behind in the countryside to enter the urban middleclass home as domestic helpers thanks to China’s latest boom of urban development and care economy. They are expected to make intensive emotional investment in their daily toils to create an enriching environment for the best material and affective benefits of their employers’ families. Meanwhile, domestic workers’ everyday struggles, concerns, and emotional needs are often brushed under the rug as trivial matters, while mainstream media tend to represent them as insignificant and untrustworthy laborers who are belittled and devalued for their age, gender, class, and lack of symbolic and cultural capital. This essay examines the ways women worker writers bring back these “small matters” to public discourse and articulate their deep concerns for gender equity and social justice. Through their persistent intellectual and organizational labor, the meaning of care is transformed from a naturalized gendered ritual in traditional patriarchal system and commodified labor in the profit-driven care economy into a networking strategy deployed ingeniously by women workers in their active efforts to build up a literary collective that pushes for accumulative micro-changes characterized by cultural creativity, gendered resistance, and grassroots solidarity.
{"title":"Caring for the Small: Gendered Resistance and Solidarity through Chinese Domestic Workers’ Writings","authors":"H. Xiao","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990695","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, over 35 million female migrant workers have left their families behind in the countryside to enter the urban middleclass home as domestic helpers thanks to China’s latest boom of urban development and care economy. They are expected to make intensive emotional investment in their daily toils to create an enriching environment for the best material and affective benefits of their employers’ families. Meanwhile, domestic workers’ everyday struggles, concerns, and emotional needs are often brushed under the rug as trivial matters, while mainstream media tend to represent them as insignificant and untrustworthy laborers who are belittled and devalued for their age, gender, class, and lack of symbolic and cultural capital. This essay examines the ways women worker writers bring back these “small matters” to public discourse and articulate their deep concerns for gender equity and social justice. Through their persistent intellectual and organizational labor, the meaning of care is transformed from a naturalized gendered ritual in traditional patriarchal system and commodified labor in the profit-driven care economy into a networking strategy deployed ingeniously by women workers in their active efforts to build up a literary collective that pushes for accumulative micro-changes characterized by cultural creativity, gendered resistance, and grassroots solidarity.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"46 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45616268","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990705
Xiang Ma, Mel Y. Chen
Rather than simply lamenting migrant workers’ everyday struggles and harsh working conditions, Ma Xiang’s essay seeks to provide a structural analysis of the socioeconomic injustice facing tens of millions of domestic helpers. Strengthening an insider’s plain account with narrative strategies of reportage literature and investigative journalism, this short piece demonstrates migrant workers’ unrecognized capacity to make a critical examination of the systematic exploitations and inequalities in a capital-dominant world.
{"title":"Women Domestic Workers Reveal Secrets of the Trade","authors":"Xiang Ma, Mel Y. Chen","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990705","url":null,"abstract":"Rather than simply lamenting migrant workers’ everyday struggles and harsh working conditions, Ma Xiang’s essay seeks to provide a structural analysis of the socioeconomic injustice facing tens of millions of domestic helpers. Strengthening an insider’s plain account with narrative strategies of reportage literature and investigative journalism, this short piece demonstrates migrant workers’ unrecognized capacity to make a critical examination of the systematic exploitations and inequalities in a capital-dominant world.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"104 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46386416","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990701
Meng Yu , Jackson Martin, I. Allred
First published at Jianjiao buluo’s social media platform on February 17, 2020, Meng Yu’s article is the first installment in the serial publications at Jianjiao buluo that deal with the common theme “Lockdown and Mobility: Chinese Domestic Workers in the midst of the Pandemic.” Meng Yu is a domestic worker in her fifties. In early 2020, she had to go back to her hometown in rural China after the outbreak of the pandemic. This essay shows the enormous impact that the pandemic had on women migrant workers and how their bonding with fellow workers helps them to pull through the unprecedentedly difficult times.
{"title":"I Am Not Afraid of Being Infected","authors":"Meng Yu , Jackson Martin, I. Allred","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990701","url":null,"abstract":"First published at Jianjiao buluo’s social media platform on February 17, 2020, Meng Yu’s article is the first installment in the serial publications at Jianjiao buluo that deal with the common theme “Lockdown and Mobility: Chinese Domestic Workers in the midst of the Pandemic.” Meng Yu is a domestic worker in her fifties. In early 2020, she had to go back to her hometown in rural China after the outbreak of the pandemic. This essay shows the enormous impact that the pandemic had on women migrant workers and how their bonding with fellow workers helps them to pull through the unprecedentedly difficult times.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"98 - 101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59988027","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990706
. Dust, Hui Meng
Out of deep concerns for her fellow women workers, Dust published this article to share her hard-earned experiences and strategies of negotiating with profit-minded domestic service companies that had expanded fast by making every possible effort to exploit workers’ labor. Dust’s article was published at Jianjiao buluo’s social media platform under the title “A Drifting Domestic Woman Worker” (“Beipiao de jiazheng nügong”) on May 13, 2019. We are thankful for Jianjiao buluo’s authorization to publish this translated version in this special section.
{"title":"History of a Domestic Worker’s Struggles with Domestic Service Companies","authors":" . Dust, Hui Meng","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990706","url":null,"abstract":"Out of deep concerns for her fellow women workers, Dust published this article to share her hard-earned experiences and strategies of negotiating with profit-minded domestic service companies that had expanded fast by making every possible effort to exploit workers’ labor. Dust’s article was published at Jianjiao buluo’s social media platform under the title “A Drifting Domestic Woman Worker” (“Beipiao de jiazheng nügong”) on May 13, 2019. We are thankful for Jianjiao buluo’s authorization to publish this translated version in this special section.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"106 - 109"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44287452","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990702
Ruoshi Li, J. Broach
Chinese marriage customs are often a point of conflict for lovers and their parents. Traditionally, the bride marries into the groom’s family and prioritizes this new family. While times are changing, these customs are still in the minds of Chinese parents, and many fear they will lose their daughter. The following is a related story about a female migrant worker who falls in love with a man far away from home.
{"title":"Yanzi’s Love Story","authors":"Ruoshi Li, J. Broach","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990702","url":null,"abstract":"Chinese marriage customs are often a point of conflict for lovers and their parents. Traditionally, the bride marries into the groom’s family and prioritizes this new family. While times are changing, these customs are still in the minds of Chinese parents, and many fear they will lose their daughter. The following is a related story about a female migrant worker who falls in love with a man far away from home.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"102 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42078205","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}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990712
Haomin Gong
{"title":"Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twentieth-First-Century China: Morning Sun in the Tiny Times","authors":"Haomin Gong","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990712","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"130 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43085317","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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