Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990694
G. Lin, Stephen Nashef
In this essay Lin Gang argues that Xue Yiwei’s “King Lear” and Nineteen Seventy-Nine (“Lier Wang” yu 1979) is the first Chinese novel to truly follow in the footsteps of Western modernism, specifically Joyce’s Ulysses. The relationship between Xue’s novel and Shakespeare’s King Lear mirrors that between Ulysses and Homer’s The Odyssey, which sees the narrative structure of a previous text repurposed in a modern context. Xue’s novel makes use of this literary technique to reflect on Chinese modern history, using the notion of fate as a metaphor for the powerful forces of history to which ordinary people find themselves helplessly subject. By focusing on the protagonist’s spirit of defiance, Lin argues, “King Lear” and Nineteen Seventy-Nine distinguishes itself from most Chinese literature set in the same period.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990699
Eleanor Goodman
To approach Zheng Xiaoqiong’s work is to confront issues of internal Chinese migration, global capitalism and income disparities, the contemporary Chinese poetry scene, geopolitics, the world economy, feminism, wage discrimination, and worker’s rights—all before one even addresses the most important part: Zheng’s own unique poetics. Although Zheng has published several books and her work has been enthusiastically received in China and in international poetry circles, her poetry has typically been viewed within a very narrow rubric, namely the category of “migrant worker poetry” and the identity-based appellation of “migrant worker poet.” This article approaches Zheng’s work through the lens of translation into English, and situates her and her writing within the larger literary and sociological circles in which she places herself. In so doing, this study attempts to provide a less restrictive and more nuanced view of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s oeuvre and overarching poetic aesthetic.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990709
Ruoshi Li, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Li Ruo is from Henan Province and is a member of the Picun Literature Group in Beijing. She left her hometown more than ten years ago and has worked in both southern and northern China. She loves literature and is a freelance writer for the non-fiction column “The Human World” (“Renjian”) on NetEase.com.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990698
Haomin Gong
This article takes Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry as an example and investigates Chinese New Women Workers’ writing under the postsocialist and neoliberal condition. It begins with a critical survey of the emerging discourse of New Workers’ Literature in China, followed by positioning Zheng’s depiction of female migrant workers’ dagong experience within the women’s question in contemporary China. I read Zheng’s writing from the combined perspectives of gender and class, investigating the way in which the sexuality of female migrant workers is remodeled or reproduced by capital and their labor. Finally, I explore how their labor, essentially governed by capitalist logic, contributes to their quagmires in developing sound gender identity and effective class consciousness. I argue that Zheng’s portrayal of female migrant workers resonates with the development of new workers and new conditions for women and helps to build a unique case representative of New Women Workers’ Literature in postsocialist China.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990692
Yiwei Xue, Betty Perrow
The story of Xue Yiwei’s “The Former Courier Station” (“Yizhan”) was based on the writer’s real-life experience of escorting his grandmother to visit her hometown in Ningxiang County of Hunan Province in the late 1980s. Xue wrote many short stories that explore the meaning of life and death during this time, and “The Former Courier Station” is one of the representative pieces. It was originally published in the supplement of the United Daily News in Taiwan and later collected in Xue’s anthology The Dolphin That Won’t Leave (Buken liqu de haitun), published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2012.
{"title":"The Former Courier Station","authors":"Yiwei Xue, Betty Perrow","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990692","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990692","url":null,"abstract":"The story of Xue Yiwei’s “The Former Courier Station” (“Yizhan”) was based on the writer’s real-life experience of escorting his grandmother to visit her hometown in Ningxiang County of Hunan Province in the late 1980s. Xue wrote many short stories that explore the meaning of life and death during this time, and “The Former Courier Station” is one of the representative pieces. It was originally published in the supplement of the United Daily News in Taiwan and later collected in Xue’s anthology The Dolphin That Won’t Leave (Buken liqu de haitun), published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2012.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"30 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48660801","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: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990684
Yiwei Xue, Kechen Feng, Stephen Nashef
In this piece Feng Kechen has compiled a selection of extracts from Desertion, Xue Yiwei’s first novel, which since its publication thirty years ago has continued to garner increasing attention among Chinese readers. As well as a short introduction by Feng Kechen, this piece features the first partial translation of Xue Yiwei’s debut into English.
{"title":"Desertion: Selected Extracts","authors":"Yiwei Xue, Kechen Feng, Stephen Nashef","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1990684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1990684","url":null,"abstract":"In this piece Feng Kechen has compiled a selection of extracts from Desertion, Xue Yiwei’s first novel, which since its publication thirty years ago has continued to garner increasing attention among Chinese readers. As well as a short introduction by Feng Kechen, this piece features the first partial translation of Xue Yiwei’s debut into English.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"27 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48791587","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: 10.1080/21514399.2021.2049175
Jing-yan Wang, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Wang Jingyun is a woman migrant worker who has published numerous poems in prestigious poetry journals and anthologies. She is also a member of the Chongqing Writers’ Association. Her poems were collected in the volume River of the Moment (Yi shunjian de heliu). She also likes to sing and dance, and she plays the zither.
{"title":"Seven Poems by Wang Jingyun 王景云","authors":"Jing-yan Wang, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.2049175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.2049175","url":null,"abstract":"Wang Jingyun is a woman migrant worker who has published numerous poems in prestigious poetry journals and anthologies. She is also a member of the Chongqing Writers’ Association. Her poems were collected in the volume River of the Moment (Yi shunjian de heliu). She also likes to sing and dance, and she plays the zither.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"120 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47079202","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: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990700
Xiaoqiong Zheng, Xiaojing Zhou
“Migrations—A Feather” is one of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s recent works of fiction and her most experimental so far. Although the people and their experience depicted in this piece are fictional, they are based on historical events. Zheng yokes together two great migrations in China—one which lasted more than a century from 1671 to 1776, the other presently underway since the mid-1980s. In reconstructing the historical records of a clan’s chronicles, and fictionalizing the narrator, Zheng breaks away from traditional narrative strategies by leaving out the “story” and “characters” and emulates in part an idiosyncratically succinct classical Chinese style for narrating the two migrations on route, interlacing through juxtapositions their two movements in opposite directions, separated by more than two hundred years, yet linked by clan lineage. She employs distinctive styles and voices to depict drastically different experiences of the two migrations, and explores new possibilities of language and images to capture the speaker’s experience, thoughts, feelings, and imaginings shaped by dehumanizing environments of the factory, capitalism, and market economy. As she pushes the boundaries of literary genres, her magical, surrealistic images and poetic language enact resistance to oppressive systems and forces, in a manner distinct from her earlier works. Moreover, this historical fiction is also about life, death, time, history, imagination, and transformation. The transformation here is more than dehumanization and environmental degradation by industry and capitalism. It is taking place in the migrants’ ways of living, thinking, and feeling, as embodied by Zheng’s innovative use of form, images, and language, which suggest new ways of writing fiction by crossing boundaries of genres.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1990708
Xiaoqiong Zheng, Eleanor Goodman
From the historical to the political to the delicately personal, Zheng Xiaoqiong’s subject matter ranges widely. What remains consistent throughout her work, however, is a commitment to confronting the realities that surround us unflinchingly. As Akira Kurosawa has it, the artist must never avert her eyes. In these poems, Zheng demonstrates that she never does.
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