Bruce Humes

As of early 2010, Meyer’s entire Twilight series—all four translated volumes—now rank among the Top Ten Fiction Best Sellers in China.

What’s driving the sales: A newly acquired national passion for vampire romance? The image of the photogenic female author from the US?  Integrated marketing of the films + novels that push the right buttons?

I picked up a Chinese copy of Eclipse (月食) here in Shenzhen lately, and I can tell you one thing: the reading “experience” of the Chinese reader is likely to be a bit different than among Twilight’s fervent fěnsī (fans) in the West.

Meyer’s prose seems to average 3.5 lines to a paragraph in the original. Hardly tough going. But many of the footnotes that dot her yuèshí (eclipse) take up a third of a page, and a handful occupy more than half a page. Right there in the text, not at the end of the chapter. In mice type, China style.

And get this—there are a total of 49 footnotes in the entire novel. The lion’s share fall into one of three categories: geography, Greek mythology and what one might call Americana. Read the rest of this entry »

“Honestly speaking, I don’t know where he is. China has 1.3 billion people and I can’t know all of their whereabouts.”

(Ma Zhaoxu, PRC Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, on the whereabouts of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng. According to reports in the New York Times, Gao was taken away from his home by China security agents one year ago this week, and has not been heard from since.)

Keeping Chinese media free of Spiritual Pollution is a 24/7 job. You not only have to patrol the Internet and guard diligently against trojan horses for grass-roots democracy like Avatar, you also have to do facelifts on international sports news items for the masses. Like those recent reports on tennis stars Li Na and Zheng Jie, for instance.

And, of course, book reviews. One of my favorites is what happened to Newsweek’s review of the best-seller by Yu Hua, Brothers (兄弟), when it was translated into Chinese.

Book reviews of books by foreigners about China can be translated, even if the books themselves might not be published in the PRC. But there’s a certain art to it. Take Big China Books: Enough of the Big Picture from Time magazine, which I run in full below. The reviewer harshly criticizes several well-known works for their superficiality and over-generalizations about China, including The Coming Collapse of China, The Writing on the Wall, and more recently, When China Rules the World. A handful of books are cited to show that better writing on China is indeed available, but the reviewer saves much of his praise and word count for Peter Hessler’s Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory.

Time’s review of these “Big China Books” has been translated by Cankao Xiaoxi (参考消息), a respected Chinese-language digest of the world press with a long history, and in many cities across China it sells out every day before noon. As noted in past pieces, virtually no English is used and no content is added. But references deemed unbecoming to China’s image are often deleted. To show you how repackaging works in the People’s Republic,  the original book review is fully reproduced below. Words that have been crossed out are those that were deleted from the Chinese version published in Cankao Xiaoxi.

You almost get the feeling that Hessler’s new book didn’t make the Recommended Reading list in the People’s Republic… Read the rest of this entry »

It’s great news for China sport fans: for the first time ever, two Chinese female tennis players (including Zheng Jie, below) have made it into the semi-finals of a Grand Slam tournament at the Australian Open. Media coverage in the PRC is, understandably, ecstatic.

The only hitch is that these two just happen to be women who have said “No” to China’s state-run sports monolith. They choose their own schedules and coaches, and—eat your heart out, Yao Ming!—they get to keep most of their prize money.

To ensure that patriotic Chinese get the right “angle” on this story, Cankao Xiaoxi (参考消息) has taken an ax to the Agence France Presse report, deleting everything that indicates these athletes are independent of the State. As noted in past pieces, Cankao Xiaoxi is a respected Chinese-language digest of the world press with a long history, and in many cities across China it sells out every day before noon. Virtually no English is used and no content is added. But references deemed unbecoming to China’s image are often deleted.

To show you how censorship/repackaging works in the People’s Republic, MSN’s original report is fully reproduced below. Words that have been crossed out are those that were deleted from the Chinese version. A few words that have been added appear in [brackets]. Read the rest of this entry »

All links below are in Chinese only, but some of the events will (I believe!) be provided with simultaneous interpretation.

Visit here for a list of all conferences/seminars in Chinese.

Here is a full list of Chinese authors and events, and some highlights below:

• Ha Jin speaking about the immigrant experience and his new book, A Good Fall
• Ha Jin and Guo Xiaolu: A tale of two cities—writing when living outside of China
• Bi Feiyu and Cai Sufen:  Evolution of the representation of female characters in Chinese fiction
• Leung Man Tao: Launch of his new book, Obsession (我执)

Full list of events with French authors, and highlights below:

• Authors scheduled to appear  include: Francois Place, Anne Cazor, Nicole Lambert, Maris Treps, Patrick Bonneville, Max Ducos, Brigitte Labbé, Roland Brival, Philippe Claudel, Muriel Barbery, Jen-Noel Pancrazi, Olivier Ferrieux…

Venue/date: UCLA (Los Angeles), January 29 2010

Survey of the History of Taiwanese Historiography:

The Literature on Taiwan Series (Taiwan wenxian congkan), compiled and published by the Office of Economic Research of the Bank of Taiwan, contains the largest number of historical sources on Taiwan written in Chinese. There are four types: (1) government archives and official records, mostly from the Qing period; (2) a variety of writings about Taiwan by officials and sojourners from the mainland; (3) a number of local gazetteers (fangzhi) compiled officially or semi-officially by Qing officials and their assistants, who included Taiwanese gentry and scholars; and (4) a greater number of local gazetteers and writings in various genres by Taiwanese in the period of Japanese rule. Though the fourth type extended the third, it was more significant in the development of Taiwanese historiography, because it reflected and registered the emergence of a native, or Taiwanese, consciousness. This Taiwanese consciousness was nurtured by the unique experience the islanders underwent after the Qing ceded their land to Japan.

Check out the events scheduled from Feb 5 to 19 (2010) at the Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival.

UCLA Center for Chinese Studies

Venue: UCLA, Royce 243 (Los Angeles, California)

Date: 12:00-13:30, January 20, 2010 

China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) saw a negative politicization of women: the feminine, particularly in its sexual functions, was cast as a dangerous distraction from the project of revolution. Even in Scar Literature (伤痕文学), the body of works written after the violence of the Cultural Revolution, women often appear as femme fatales alluring men away from their fidelity to the revolution. This paper argues that this lingering toxicity of women’s sexuality created an interregnuma stale-mated period of social identity for women writers of the era: the genre of Scar Literature presupposed historical distance and an act of catharsis, while the narratives that first emerged within this genre revived injurious constructions of femininity. Reading women’s Scar Literature as narratives of this interregnum illuminates a contentious process of rehabilitating desire and reconstituting gender.

The author of Chengdu, Leave Me Alone (成都，今夜请将我遗忘) and Dancing through Red Dust (原谅我红尘颠倒), Murong Xuecun (慕容雪村) will be on stage with his translator Harvey Thomlinson during the Man Hong Kong Literary Festival 2010. Here’s the blurb:

Good translation is as much a work of art as the piece being translated. Yet often the subtleties and nuances of language—the things that make a work original—are missed in the process. Is it possible to create a mirror of the original? To what extent does a translator have the opportunity to discuss a work’s nuances with the author? Join Murong Xuecun and his translator, Harvey Thomlinson, as they shed some light on these questions. Session will be in English and Putonghua. 

Venue/date: Monday, March 15 2010. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chung Chi College Library

To register for a free ticket, click here…and plan to cruise for a while. Who designed this site? It’s the first web site to make me feel seasick.

China Publishing Today reports that Guo Jingming’s Tiny Times 2.0, a new hardback following on the heels of the best-selling paperback Tiny Times 1.0, sold 38,552 copies in three hours on on December 29 at online bookstore Dangdang.com. This figure was cited by the publisher Changjiang Literature & Art Press. 

At Live Journal, we learn that “despite the fact that Tiny Times 1.0 already dealt with dark subject matter like rape, Guo Jingming has said ‘Tiny Times 1.0 is like a fairytale compared to 2.0.’ Hunan TV acquired the copyrights for a drama version last year, although it has not started production.”