Ethnic ChinaLit

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.

It began back in 2008 with Penguin investing heavily—$100,000 is the rumored price—to purchase Jiang Rong’s tale set in Inner Mongolia, Wolf Totem. This year two newly translated novels have joined China’s “borderland fiction” category: Fan Wen’s Une terre de lait et de miel, located in the gateway to Tibet straddling Yunnan and Sichuan, and Chi Zijian’s Last Quarter of the Moon, which features the reindeer-herding Evenki whose lives revolve around the Argun River that demarcates the Sino-Russian border.

Penned in Chinese, these novels are the creations of Han authors who have consciously chosen to set their tales among non-Han peoples who have historically resided at the fringes of the Middle Kingdom. Ran Ping’s Legend of Mongolia (蒙古往事), a fictionalized biography of Genghis Khan that was short-listed for the Mao Dun Literary Prize in 2008, also falls into this category, but it has not been translated into a European language.

Of course, there are popular novelists of various ethnicities who choose to write about their people using Chinese. Part-Tibetan Alai, author of King Gesar (格萨尔王) and Red Poppies (尘埃落定), comes to mind, for instance

But what about writers who not only speak two languages native to China, but write in both? How does their ability to move seamlessly between two tongues impact their choice of themes and their “narrative voice”? Two such authors have recently come to my attention, one who writes in Tibetan and Chinese, and another who has mastered Uyghur and Chinese.

Fortunately for you—if you read French—7 of Pema Tseden’s short stories originally in Tibetan (3) and Chinese (4) have just been released in one volume from Editions Philippe Picquier, Neige. Filmmaker and writer Tseden (པད་མ་ཚེ་བརྟན།) is a pioneer in the use of Tibetan, the first mainland director to ever shoot a film entirely in his native tongue (Old Dog). Read the rest of this entry »

Some 340 projects proposed by 251 China publishers are set to benefit from some pretty hefty funding—a total of US$57m—via the 2013 China Publication Fund (2013 国家出版基金), according to a March 26, 2013 Xinhua report (340 项目). For the first time since such funding came on stream in 2007, all 12 of China’s western-most provinces have approved projects on the list, including Tibet with 9 worth over US$2.7m. For a complete list of all 340 projects in Chinese, click here.

I list some approved projects concerning the culture, history and literature of non-Han peoples:

Tibet specialist Françoise Robin has kindly alerted me to the fact that the February 2013 Tibetan edition of National Literature Magazine (民族文学杂志，藏文版) features two pieces by Turkey’s Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk. If your Tibetan is up to par, read about them here: མི་རིགས་ཀྱི་རྩོམ་རིག.

One is apparently a speech by Pamuk that translates as “Eastern and Western cultures and the Literary Imagination” in English, and the other is a Tibetan version of The Ship on the Golden Horn, the penultimate chapter of his Istanbul: Memories of the City (Istanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir).

Is this part of China’s government-endorsed “Turkish Culture Year” campaign? Can’t say for sure,

A dose of hüzün for Tibetan readers

though I wouldn’t be surprised. National Literature Magazine (民族文学) is a state-run publication now available in Han Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh, Korean, Mongolian and Tibetan.

But it would be interesting to know how Tibetan renders that peculiarly Turkish concept—hüzün or (something akin to) melancholy—that runs throughout Pamuk’s work.

Date/time: 19:30 March 24 (Sunday)

Venue: Chengdu Bookworm

Topic: “The View from the Plateau”: A Lai (阿来) discusses his novels, their Tibetan setting, his rise to literary fame and his take on editing the largest-circulation sci-fi magazine in the world. He writes in Chinese, and his works include King Gesar (格萨尔王) and Red Poppies (尘埃落定).

March 18 Update: Nicky Harman to Translate into English

Chan Koonchung, the Beijing-based, HK-born author of the Fat Years (盛世) has just launched his new, sure-to-be-controversial novel in Chinese, entitled <裸命> (The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver). Hong Kong’s Peony Literary Agency reports it has negotiated the sale of rights to Transworld Publishing, and plans are to release it in English in May 2014.

According to book reviewer Du Ting (杜婷), the tale is written from the point of view of a young Tibetan man who is a volunteer for an animal protection NGO and also serves as a security guard at a hotel enigmatically named after the CCP’s key “maintain stability” policy (维稳宾馆), not to mention his other “identity”—as lover to a Han woman.

No wonder the Chinese media outside the mainland—naturally, it has only been published in Hong Kong and Taiwan—describe the novel as “erotic political fiction” (情色政治小说). Read the rest of this entry »

March 22 Update:

Dunhuang Visitor Center under Construction at Edge of the Gobi Desert 

*********

Expect to hear a lot about “cultural projects” out of Gansu Province in the near future. The State Council has just approved the establishment of a “Chinese Civilization Inheritance & Innovation Zone”—甘肃华夏文明传承新区—in this province that borders Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia to the north, Xinjiang and Qinghai to the west, Sichuan to the south, and Shaanxi to the east.

The new zone will highlight silk road “culture,” the Jiayuguan Pass (嘉峪关), the Hexi Corridor (河西走廊) with its Buddhist-themed Mogao Grottoes (see photo), and sites and museums in metropolitan Lanzhou on the Yellow River.

This is a national project supported by the central government, and that could mean big investment. Some 7 billion yuan (US$1.1b) has reportedly already been invested in related projects (see Poised to Cash in on Cultural Assets).

In the last few days four publishing projects proposed by the Gansu authorities have been approved by the China Publishing Fund (国家出版基金管理委员会) to the tune of US$726,000 (甘肃出版项目). They include one for the publication of the second volume in a collection of orally transmitted Tibetan folk culture (第二辑 《藏族民间口传文化汇点》).

有时候她来了，我还没来，她缓过气来，就会替我打手枪。我想她用嘴，但她不喜欢。我试过把鸡巴送到她的嘴边，她也只是放进嘴里假装吃几下，更多是稍稍亲一下，然后就用手。我不念经，但是也不喜欢用念经的嘴巴去蹭她的逼，我们就扯平吧。

(from Chan Koonchung’s The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver (<裸命>, 陈冠中著), tale of a Han woman’s Tibetan chauffeur who doubles as her lover-on-demand)

Une terre de lait et de miel, Stéphane Lévêque’s rendering of Fan Wen’s Shuǐ Rǔ dàdì (水乳大地, 范稳著), will be available for purchase in French bookstores and online beginning March 28.

Shui Ru Dadi tells the tale of a multi-ethnic settlement in Lancangjiang Canyon—gateway to Tibet—beset by battles between arrogant French Catholic missionaries, incompetent Han officials and their marauding troops, Naxi Dongba Shamanists, and the dominant Tibetans, not all of whom lead pacific, vegetarian lives in the local lamasery.

The saga spans most of the 20th century, hopping back and forth between the decades and capturing the non-linear Tibetan sense of time. Fan Wen’s imagination almost seems to get the better of him as Living Buddhas levitate, Shamans summon spirits for battle, and Communist Party officials rue their Red Guard days, but his tale is firmly rooted in the locale’s colorful history. Historical fiction with dabs of highly entertaining “supernatural realism” thrown in, if you like.

Related links:

• An interview with author Fan Wen
• An interview with translator Stéphane Lévêque
• English excerpt from the last part in the trilogy, Canticle to the Land (大地雅歌)

What has happened since 2001 when Zhongdian (中甸), a traditionally Tibetan village in Yunnan Province, changed its name to Shangri-la after the “lost paradise” immortalized in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon?

Minnpost.com has just published Manufacturing Shangri-la, a 3-part series, that explores that question, particularly the seemingly inevitable impact of tourism, not just foreign but domestic too:

Across China, minorities not seen as a threat (Tibetans, Uighurs) are generally portrayed as colorful people who sing and dance and love to entertain visitors.

This stereotype is visible at Yunnan’s ethnic tourism sights. Strolling around Lijiang, a tourist-mobbed town south of Shangri-la, can be shocking for many Americans accustomed to political correctness. Women in “native” costumes—many of them Han—wave clappers outside a raucous strip of bars, where patrons watch dancers in neon headdresses perform Tibetan, Lisu and Yi moves to thumping music.

“The different cultures have different standards of what’s a good tourist time,” says Ed Grumbine, an American professor who studies botany in Yunnan. “In the US, if you had a bunch of Hispanic people dressing up and doing a Navajo dance and claiming it was legitimate, it would be an outrage. In China, it’s not an outrage, it’s business as usual.”

Indeed, commercializing the culture is the whole point. And rather than being a source of tension, the added income is a key ingredient in Shangri-La’s peaceful coexistence.