Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1750880
Yanmei Zhang, Yingying Huang
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.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1750839
Kai-cheung Dung, Andrea Lingenfelter
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.
这是香港小说家邓凯祥2018年小说《宠儿》的第二部分。第一部分是从大学教授Seh Zi Yin的角度讲述的，故事开始于Seh在机场送别他的妻子Lung Yuk Man，当时她正在英国剑桥开始休假。第一部分描述了徐在妻子不在的情况下的生活，包括他遇到了一个神秘的外国人，他正在研究可以复制、上传、存储和下载人类意识的技术。第二部分完全由徐和他的妻子之间的对话组成，颠覆了徐的世界。邓的小说在一定程度上受到了《壳中鬼》的启发，它既是一场婚姻的故事，也是对人类意义的哲学探索。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1750897
Simon Schuchat
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”:
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1750895
M. Berry
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.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1750850
Xu Zechen, Xu Shiyan
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.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1750887
Jing Li, Ping Zhu
“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.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1750838
Isaac (Shuntang) Hsu, Tze-lan Sang
“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.
《风流韵事》（The Affair）由艾萨克·许（Isaac（Shuntong）Hsu）创作，1988年在台湾获得中国时报科幻奖。在台湾的科幻迷和评论家中，许是唯一一位为台湾科幻文学黄金时代做出贡献并至今仍活跃的作家。他因在具体的科学理论和严谨的推测基础上创造虚构的宇宙而特别受到赞誉。《婚外情》是一部短篇小说，讲述了人工智能的发展所引发的道德和人性的尖锐问题。这个故事的基本概念与艾萨克·阿西莫夫的《机器人三定律》产生了强烈的共鸣。台湾著名科幻评论家Daneel Lynn表示，徐是唯一一位创作出与阿西莫v的《机器人》系列非常一致的科幻故事的台湾作家。他甚至观察到，《婚外情》提出了一个与阿西莫夫的机器人零定律非常相似的概念。《婚外情》是徐的哈姆雷特三部曲的第一个故事，该三部曲探讨了自由、平等、博爱的概念，因为它涉及人类与人工智能之间的互动。三部曲的最后一个故事《机器人的告别》最近出现在徐的新科幻小说集《玩偶之血和其他故事》（Kuilei xielei ji qita gushi）中，该书由盖亚图书有限公司有限公司出版。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1750882
Zechen Xu, Natascha Bruce
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.
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