Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1852034
Amir Khan
c h in es e l it er a tu re to d ay v o l. 9 n o . 2 struggles for a new life in the church of Pastor Billy. After futile attempts to hide from her degraded past, she determines to confront shame and speak out. She cuts off her ties to Zhaohu, now an officer in training, and falls in love with Ian. However, along with Pastor Billy’s accidental death and Ian’s permanent return to America, Ah Yan is left alone at the end of the war. She gives birth to a mixed-race daughter that she has with Ian and settles back in her home village. As Zhaohu escapes from the Nationalists’ retreat to Taiwan, she takes him in and exhausts herself saving him from imprisonment and caring for him until the last moment of his life. Like many of Zhang Ling’s earlier novels, A Single Swallow adopts a non-linear narrative that creates gripping suspense. The souls of the three men recount their piece of personal stories in retrospect from a first-person limited point of view. Their narrations complement and sometimes contradict each other, presenting diverse perspectives and cultural clashes in a Chinese rural village during its first encounter with the West. In contrast, Ah Yan, also called Stella and Wende (“Wind”) respectively by Pastor Billy and Ian, is curiously silenced; her words can only be occasionally heard through the subjective lens of male narrators. The absence of Ah Yan’s voice betrays the invisible discursive oppression of women in a patriarchal culture. Various genres of letter, journal, county record, and newspaper article are included to add a historical sense to the novel. In a unique narrative style, A Single Swallow compels readers to reflect on innocence and humanity through the prism of war.
{"title":"Mobo C. F. Gao. Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China","authors":"Amir Khan","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1852034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1852034","url":null,"abstract":"c h in es e l it er a tu re to d ay v o l. 9 n o . 2 struggles for a new life in the church of Pastor Billy. After futile attempts to hide from her degraded past, she determines to confront shame and speak out. She cuts off her ties to Zhaohu, now an officer in training, and falls in love with Ian. However, along with Pastor Billy’s accidental death and Ian’s permanent return to America, Ah Yan is left alone at the end of the war. She gives birth to a mixed-race daughter that she has with Ian and settles back in her home village. As Zhaohu escapes from the Nationalists’ retreat to Taiwan, she takes him in and exhausts herself saving him from imprisonment and caring for him until the last moment of his life. Like many of Zhang Ling’s earlier novels, A Single Swallow adopts a non-linear narrative that creates gripping suspense. The souls of the three men recount their piece of personal stories in retrospect from a first-person limited point of view. Their narrations complement and sometimes contradict each other, presenting diverse perspectives and cultural clashes in a Chinese rural village during its first encounter with the West. In contrast, Ah Yan, also called Stella and Wende (“Wind”) respectively by Pastor Billy and Ian, is curiously silenced; her words can only be occasionally heard through the subjective lens of male narrators. The absence of Ah Yan’s voice betrays the invisible discursive oppression of women in a patriarchal culture. Various genres of letter, journal, county record, and newspaper article are included to add a historical sense to the novel. In a unique narrative style, A Single Swallow compels readers to reflect on innocence and humanity through the prism of war.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"86 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1852034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41374109","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 : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1852017
Bai Lin, Ping Zhu
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1851953
Minhui Lu, Shelly Bryant
In her speech at the Chinese Literature Bo’ao Forum on November 3, 2015 (published in Literature and Arts Newspaper, Issue 3, November 23, 2015), Lu Min highlighted the pressure many contemporary Chinese writers feel to write modern, urban novels. She identifies the primary source of this pressure as originating with foreign publishing houses and literary agents, and then observes that it has since begun to permeate the mindset of Chinese writers and publishers as well. Though she states a firm disagreement with this preference for urban writing, she explains why the preference has come to be established, pointing to the tastes of foreign readers (who may find more rural or “local color” stories difficult to identify with), the impulse of foreign readers to treat literature as a window that will provide them with a view of China and the Chinese people, and the assumption on the part of Western readers that urban living is the life Chinese writers know best. It is the final point that Lu Min pursues for the duration of the speech, offering the rationale behind her disagreement with the assumption that Chinese writers are urbanites. While acknowledging that she and many of her generation do live in cities today, she contrasts this to their early years, which most of the prominent names in the contemporary Chinese fiction world spent in the countryside. She describes the effects this upbringing has had on their psyche, including a preference for speaking in dialect when they are most emotional and a more rustic mindset that underlies even their experience of the city. Though most of this generation of writers has become adept at urban living, there is a fundamental sense in which they remain outsiders to the city, not having fully absorbed urban mindsets, at least not to the degree that rural mindsets have been displaced by them. She argues that the most that these writers can do is offer their insights into a small piece of urban China, but that those insights are never fully expressive of the true Chinese urbanite’s experience. However, even as she acknowledges these limitations, Lu Min ultimately embraces the demands made on Chinese writers by the Western publishing scene, viewing the tension between the writer’s experience and the public’s expectations as a force that challenges neatly delineated identities and, in so doing, forges from that self-contradictory experience a literature that is fresh and uniquely Chinese. From Issue 2 of Chinese Arts and Literature, published by Xanadu Press, 2016; reprinted by permission of Chinese Arts and Literature.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1852016
Yuewen Wang, J. Broach
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1851955
Minhui Lu, Jeremy Tiang
Twenty years ago, the narrator ran a successful duck shop in Nanjing. When a friend told him that his wife was having an affair with Manager Yang, he went to confront Manager Yang to seek revenge. They had a violent altercation at Manager Yang’s house. Manager Yang suggested that in compensation, the narrator should sleep with Manager Yang’s wife, a nurse. The narrator stayed at the house till the wife returned later that afternoon, and willingly offered herself to him. Repelled by her debasement, the narrator slit her throat instead, and tried to make it look like a burglary gone wrong. Ultimately, his crime was uncovered, and he was arrested, found guilty, and executed. From Issue 2 of Chinese Arts and Literature, published by Xanadu Press, 2016; reprinted by permission of Chinese Arts and Literature.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1851964
Yiwei Xue, Miao Wei
Xue Yiwei is a contemporary Chinese writer based in Montreal, Canada. Xue’s writing is stylistically elegant, linguistically beautiful, but at times intellectually challenging. Influenced by French existentialism, Xue has a dazzling talent for revealing the absurdity and emptiness of history in his works. In this early short story, first published in 1999, the first-person narrator accidently finds out the secret of her late husband just before his funeral, which makes her disillusioned about her marriage. This story was collected in The Dolphin That Doesn’t Want to Leave (Buken liqu de haitun) as “Yu kuangfeng yiqi lüxing” by the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2012.
薛义伟，中国当代作家，现居加拿大蒙特利尔。薛的作品风格优雅，语言优美，但有时在智力上具有挑战性。在法国存在主义的影响下，薛在作品中表现出了鲜明的历史荒诞与空虚的才华。在这部1999年首次出版的早期短篇小说中，第一人称叙述者在已故丈夫葬礼前意外发现了他的秘密，这让她对自己的婚姻感到幻灭。这个故事于2012年被上海文艺出版社收录在《不想离开的海豚》（Buken liq de haitun）中，名为“俞”。
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1851961
Li Zhang, S. Patton
Lu Min’s fiction is alive with pathologies—her characters display outward signs of scopophilia, skin conditions, spells of inexplicable dizziness, or vomiting, as well as social pathologies like compulsive lying or incestual tendencies. But what drives these “unmentionable diseases” in Lu Min’s fiction? What are their causes, symptoms, or remedies? According to Zhang Li, the underlying conditions that provoke and result from these maladies arise from a compulsive need for her characters to overstep their proscribed boundaries and norms. Lu Min’s characters yearn to become what they are not, and in the face of their helplessness, they must grapple with not becoming “somebody else.” From Issue 2 of Chinese Arts and Literature, published by Xanadu Press, 2016; reprinted by permission of Chinese Arts and Literature.
{"title":"Finding New Views on Unmentionable Diseases","authors":"Li Zhang, S. Patton","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1851961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1851961","url":null,"abstract":"Lu Min’s fiction is alive with pathologies—her characters display outward signs of scopophilia, skin conditions, spells of inexplicable dizziness, or vomiting, as well as social pathologies like compulsive lying or incestual tendencies. But what drives these “unmentionable diseases” in Lu Min’s fiction? What are their causes, symptoms, or remedies? According to Zhang Li, the underlying conditions that provoke and result from these maladies arise from a compulsive need for her characters to overstep their proscribed boundaries and norms. Lu Min’s characters yearn to become what they are not, and in the face of their helplessness, they must grapple with not becoming “somebody else.” From Issue 2 of Chinese Arts and Literature, published by Xanadu Press, 2016; reprinted by permission of Chinese Arts and Literature.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"38 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1851961","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47664507","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 : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1852025
Mai Mang
Poet-critic and art curator Mai Mang organized the exhibition Wang Mansheng: From Silk Road to Hudson River at Connecticut College in early 2020. It presents Chinese artist Wang Mansheng’s journey over the past thirty years finding his roots and searching for new origins across two continents: from the Silk Road where he first felt inspired by traditional literati art as well as Buddhist art to the Hudson River Valley where he has resided since 1998 and has explored new themes such as freedom and the use of the “useless” through new mediums. More importantly, this exhibition also gives us an opportunity to delve into some of the fascinating dilemmas with which Wang has wrestled along the journey of his growth and evolution as an artist. Ultimately, Wang proclaims a quiet yet persistent stance of carving out an independent space for himself and his art, transcending contemporary chaos and strife.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2020.1852019
Xiaoya Sun, B. Yao
{"title":"Dancing in the Empty City","authors":"Xiaoya Sun, B. Yao","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2020.1852019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2020.1852019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"60 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21514399.2020.1852019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45705455","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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