Ethnic ChinaLit

China Expat Anthology: Unsavory Elements

Book Reading/ Panel Discussion

 at Hong Kong’s Bookazine

On Thursday, May 23, 6-8pm, at Hong Kong’s Bookazine Landmark Prince’s, join publisher Graham Earnshaw, editor Tom Carter and authors Nury Vittachi, Bruce Humes and Pete Spurrier to discuss their new anthology, Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China, an unprecedented collection of true tales from 28 laowai writers—including Mark Kitto, Peter Hessler and Simon Winchester—about their experiences living in the 21st-century Middle Kingdom.

Free event! Complimentary refreshments provided. Bookazine, Landmark Prince’s Building, Shop #309, 10 Chater Road, Central Hong Kong, (+852) 2522-1785

An excerpt from my piece, One of the People (I prefer my own title, 《遭遇深圳》), about my hospital stay immediately after I was badly knifed on the streets of Shenzhen:

“You’ll have to excuse us, Bruce. We’ve always looked after you as a guest,” said longtime friend Liu Jie, pausing delicately. “But yesterday we treated you like one of our own.”

Indeed. My reception the previous night at the emergency room of this People’s Sickhouse in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, was probably typical for many citizens across the country: I had been summarily treated, hastily diagnosed and then sidelined, proving that there is at least one bastion in China where a foreigner needn’t worry about receiving ‘special treatment’.

My evening had begun with a cheap imported Mexican beer and a live Filipino cover band in a bar on Shangbu Road. At half past 10 I exited with my date, said goodnight to her, and began my homeward stroll alone. I got a call, put the mobile to my right ear and kept walking. Near the intersection of Shangbu and Shenzhen East Roads, a lively juncture just a stone’s throw from the seat of the city government, I got the ugliest surprise of my life.

First came a violent tug at my hand with the handset, and then a searing pain ripped across the right side of my head. Bizarrely, I could hear a man nearby grunting like he was being kicked again and again in the ribs.

Don’t ever resist! is Shenzhen’s proverbial advice to the naive victions—and there were hundreds every month in the early years of the 21st century—confronting a determined thief. Yet there I was doing just that. I grabbed at something shiny, seized it in my palm, and held on for dear life.

The grunting stopped suddenly and I opened my eyes. Against the deep blue sky, the stars twinkled above the heads of onlookers drawn to the sight of a bleeding Westerner curled up in a fetal position on the still-warm summer concrete. . .

In what could be interpreted as another victory for the marketing of China’s Tibet to the world, in The Guardian’s Oriental Dreamworks Jeffrey

And next: animated film for the wider world

Katzenberg of Dreamworks Animation has announced that his firm will work with a Chinese partner to produce an animated version of The Tibet Code:

He Ma’s series of novels follow an expert on the Tibetan mastiff dog breed as he searches for ancient Buddhist treasure in Tibet. The books, which have been compared to the Indiana Jones films, are hugely popular in China.

However, they are a reminder of Chinese rule over the province, long repudiated by the Central Tibetan Administration – Tibet’s government in exile – which was headed until 2011 by the Dalai Lama. He Ma is an ethnic Han Chinese writer who was raised in China’s Sichuan province and has spent more than a decade living in Tibet.

In Plans to Harness Chinese River’s Power Threaten a Region, Andrew Jacobs reports on the decision to dam the Nu Jiang (怒江)—known as the Salween in Burma—regardless of potential damage to the environment and protests from China’s neighbors:

From its crystalline beginnings as a rivulet seeping from a glacier on the Tibetan Himalayas to its broad, muddy amble through the jungles of Myanmar, the Nu River is one of Asia’s wildest waterways, its 1,700-mile course unimpeded as it rolls toward the Andaman Sea.

But the Nu’s days as one of the region’s last free-flowing rivers are dwindling. The Chinese government stunned environmentalists this year by reviving plans to build a series of hydropower dams on the upper reaches of the Nu, the heart of a Unesco World Heritage site in China’s southwest Yunnan Province that ranks among the world’s most ecologically diverse and fragile places.

Related factoids from Wikipedia (Salween River):

• The Salween is one of the longest free-flowing rivers in Southeast Asia and is one of only two major free-flowing rivers in China
• Indigenous peoples along the river:  Karen, Nu, Lisu, Shan, Karenni, Wa, Tai, Mon, and Yintailai
• The river originates in the Qinghai Mountains on the Tibetan Plateau, passes through China’s Yunnan Province and flows south into northeastern Burma

The idea of the stealth gloss is that you weave an explanation into the text so that it is part of the story, as opposed to reading a footnote. I think that is a good way to handle cultural information that arrives in passing in stories. If you use a footnote, you’re taking the reader out of the reading experience. That’s good in a scholarly context, but if you’re reading a horror story, I don’t want you to start reading footnotes about quaint, archaic Swiss customs—I want you to concentrate on being scared.

(Susan Bernofsky, speaking with Shaun Randol in Words Without Borders)

“Translation isn’t a field anyone sensible would go into,” Goldblatt jokes. “Not literary translation. I have a friend who’s with the Justice Department translating Japanese legal cases. That’s a livelihood.”

(Howard Goldblatt, translator of some 50 books from the Chinese—including Mo Yan’s—speaking to Aimee Levitt in Life in Translation)

Scholars of Tibetan and Xinjiang history may be forgiven for a sense of déjà vu when reading this item. In Missiles and Memorial Stones, Didi Kirsten Tatlow points out that quite aside from the dangers posed by North Korea’s nuclear dreams, the neighbors have a longer standing dispute about the very roots of the Korean nation:

For evidence of deep suspicion among Koreans about China, people need look no further than the reported discovery late last year of a memorial stone from the Koguryo [aka Goguryeo], a dynasty that ruled approximately the territory of North Korea (and some of the South) and large parts of China’s northeastern provinces, flourishing for 700 years until 1,300 years ago.

“China conducting closed research into ancient Korean dynasty,” read a headline in the Hankyoreh, a South Korean newspaper. “Observers say work on the Goguryeo stele is an attempt to incorporate it into Chinese history,” the paper said, using an alternative spelling for Koguryo.

The issue is not new. In 2004, China-South Korean relations soured over it. As my colleague James Brooke reported at the time, the tensions were prompted, among other things, by Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, calling the kingdom a “subordinate state that fell under the jurisdiction of the Chinese dynasties and was under the great influence of China’s politics, culture and other areas.”

In Bringing up Shanghai Baby, Tom Bird at That’s PRD interviews me about translating Chi Zijian’s Last Quarter of the Moon, and Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby.

In Authorities Cancel Indie Film Festival, the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project reports that the 2013 Yunnan Multi-culture Visual Festival (云之南纪录影像展) has been cancelled. No reason whatsoever is given in the announcement in Chinese (停办通告).

Why the sudden cancellation?

I don’t know any of the details. But a clue may be somewhere in the list of films that were scheduled to be shown. Here’s the list in Chinese:  入选影片.

The standard nationalist argument is that you can truly express your essential self — your soul — only within your native language and culture. So that your self/soul is never just your own, but really belongs to your nation, thereby depriving the individual of any historical agency. And the great writers represent their nation (to itself) because they can understand themselves and the nation better than anyone. I think that’s [expletive]. For one thing, it implies that no one outside the given nation could possibly understand anything written in its language because no one outside has access to the national essence. If that were true, the whole project of literature would be doomed and translation would be meaningless. It also leads to the pursuit of typicality, so that every character has to be representative of and familiar to the nation. I believe that literature is the domain of individual — not national — sovereignty.

(Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian novelist who writes in English, speaking to Turkey’s Today’s Zaman.)

In January 2013, Beijing-based Chan Koonchung’s novel The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver (《裸命》, 陈冠中) was published in Chinese in Hong Kong. The closing chapter recounts how a young, naïve Tibetan chauffeur from Lhasa proudly takes his first job in the capital, working in what he refers to as “Preserving Stability Hotel” (维稳宾馆).

His job: to ensure that the hotel guests remain under lock and key until they can be “escorted” back to their hometowns. It takes a while for Champa to realize that he is just a tool, charged with carrying out a form of extraordinary (domestic) rendition with Chinese characteristics. Read the rest of this entry »