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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Date/Time: Tuesday 16 Apr 2013, 16:45 – 17:45

Venue: Literary Translation Centre, EC2 (London Book Fair)

Topic: In recent years there has been growing interest in literature coming out of Asia, but much of the focus has been on writing originally in English. This panel will look at what’s happening with literature written in languages other than English. Speakers will explore the translation flows in Asia – into Asia, between various Asian countries, and out of Asia – discussing trends and key issues, as well as the role of the English language in the process. On the panel: Kate Griffin (British Centre for Literary Translation), Michael Emmerich (literary translator from Japanese), Anna Holmwood (see photo at left, literary agent, translator from Chinese and Swedish, including Ai Mi’s Under the Hawthorn Tree), Alvin Pang (Singaporean poet), and Deborah Smith (literary translator from Korean).

Thursday March 21^st saw the official launch of “Turkish Culture Year in China” (土耳其文化年) in Beijing.  The road show—destined for 12 cities—includes dance and music performances, fashion shows and a “Turkish Cuisine Week,” but I haven’t found a detailed list or schedule yet. Beijing, Shanghai, Yichang (Hubei), Shenzhen and Hong Kong are confirmed road stops, though.  It comes on the heels of “Chinese Culture Year in Turkey” which ended in February and helped attract 120,000 Chinese visitors to Turkey last year.

Readers who want to get a taste of Turkish literary works in Chinese will find them thin on the ground, however; see my initial list here.  In the PRC, the only widely translated Turkish author is Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Several of his best-known novels including My Name is Red, Museum of Innocence and Snow are available in Chinese (奥尔罕·帕慕克).  <伊斯坦布尔的幸福> (Mutluluk, or Bliss in English) by Zülfü Livaneli, the writer, musician, singer, journalist and member of parliament, is one of just a handful of novels—Pamuk’s aside, obviously—that have been genuinely well received in China where Turkey still has a rather low profile.

Other translations into the Chinese tend to be dependent on Turkey’s TEDA, a program under the Ministry of Culture & Tourism that subsidizes translations and publication into many languages. Tellingly, the web site appears in Turkish, German, French and English.

Incredibly, as of end August 2012 when spokesperson Ümit Yaşar Gözüm was cited in an article about the Beijing Book Fair (Debut in Beijing), just ten subsidized works of fiction had been put into Chinese and were on display at the fair. Four of them were by Orhan Kemal (1914-70), who wrote frequently about the working class and did time in jail due to his alleged pro-communist sympathies: <父亲的家园> (Baba Evi; or My Father’s House in English); <杰米莱 > (Cemile); <在富饶的土地上> (Bereketli Topraklar Üzerinde; On Fertile Land); and <流浪的岁月> (Avare Yıllar; Idle Years). These titles in Chinese can all be seen here.

According to Gözüm there are only a handful of qualified Turkish-to-Chinese literary translators, and they can each only handle two titles a year.  They include Shen Zhixing (沈志兴), a professor of Turkish in Henan’s Loyang who has translated several of Pamuk’s novels; and three reporters for the state-run China Radio International, Xia Yongmin (夏勇敏), Yin Tingting (尹婷婷) and Tang Jiankun (汤剑昆).

Xia Yongmin, who studied in Turkey in the late 1980s, is a particularly high-profile translator, both because of his senior position at CRI and his output, including two works by Orhan Kemal (<父亲的家园> and <在富饶的土地上>), and one by a contemporary Turkish author, Murat Gülsoy, <伊斯坦布尔之仁慈七日> (A Week of Kindness in Istanbul).  Xia created and hosts “Xinjiang Today,” and as such plays a key role in China’s propaganda campaign aimed at justifying its Uyghur-related policies to speakers of Turkic languages throughout Central Asia and Turkey.

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).

Time: 10:30-11:30 Saturday, March 23

Venue: Salon du livre

Topic: Journalist Joël Dubos hosts a session with Li Kunwu (李昆武), author of 《从小李到老李: 一个中国人的生活》, rendered in French by Philippe Otié as Une Vie Chinoise.  This 3-volume autobiographical graphic novel—very popular in France and translated into Danish, English, Finnish, German, Korean and Spanish as well—spans Li’s life as a youngster in Yunnan’s Kunming during the ‘60s and the Cultural Revolution through to the first years of the 21^st century.

Time/date: 8 pm, March 18 (Monday)

Venue: Beijing Bookworm (Bldg 4, Nan Sanlitun Road, Chao Yang District)

Topic: Canaan Morse speaks with Heilongjiang author Chi Zijian (at left) about her newly translated novel, Last Quarter of the Moon (额尔古纳河右岸，迟子建著), recounting the twilight of China’s nomadic reindeer herders, the Evenki. Morse (below) is an Associate at Paper Republic, Ltd., and poetry editor of the new journal Pathlight: New Chinese Writing. A poet, he is reading an M.A. in Classical Chinese Literature at Peking University. Read the rest of this entry »

The Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival is underway. In Deeply Odd Lives of Chinese Bureaucrats, Debra Bruno reports on a session with Wang Xiaofang, author of The Civil Servant’s Notebook (公务员笔记，王晓方著 , translated by Eric Abrahamsen):

Why make up stories when life is so ridiculous?

As a bureaucrat, author Wang Xiaofang says he came across a rogue’s gallery of real-life characters: a woman who had plastic surgery on her backside so she could sleep her way to the top; a flooded apartment filled with cash owned by a top bureaucrat; another official who consulted a feng shui master to build a bridge, only because he felt he was supposed to have a bridge in his life.

At the start of his writing career, Mr. Wang figured out that you can write about Chinese officialdom – as long as you make it fiction. He told a crowd at the Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival on Wednesday that he felt “lost” when he entered official circles and saw corruption and power struggles. He didn’t want to be “spiritually crippled,” he said.

Event Title: The Reform of the Reeducation through Labor (劳教) System
Speakers: By Prof. Fu Hualing (University of Hong Kong), Dr Nicholas Bequelin (Human Rights Watch), and Joshua Rosenzweig (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Date: Tuesday, 5 March 2013 at 19:00
Venue: Room Segalen, 25/F, Admiralty Centre, Tower 2, 18 Harcourt Road, Hong Kong
Reservation & Contact: Heipo Leung cefc@cefc.com.hk / tel: 2876 6910

Topic: While reform of the Re-education through labor system has been on China’s legislative agenda for a number of years, the sudden announcement in January that the Party intends to dismantle the system by the end of the year has caught many by surprise. Indeed for decades the Public Security Bureau has successfully resisted attempts to reform a system that it considered necessary for the fulfillment of the missions mandated by the Party. So what has changed? And what comes next? The decision raises both practical issues—what to do with the people formerly “dealt with” through re-education through labor (minor offenders, drug users, prostitutes and dissidents)—as well as a political one: In the eyes of the new leadership under Xi Jinping, what role should the law play in the governance of China?

Time/date: 9:30-17:00, February 8, 2013

Venue: UCLA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Theme: Urban Discontent in the Long Eighteenth Century across Eurasia. Conference will examine various social and literary expressions of discontent in the main urban centers across these landed empires.  Topics may include urban violence, sexual mores, literary lampoons, as well as states’ responses to such challenges to their authority.

Speakers: Will include Janet Theiss, University of Utah, Lessons from a Scandal: Sex, Corruption and Social Ferment in China’s “Flourishing Age”; Keith McMahon, University of Kansas, Social Decline and Sexual Disorder in Fiction of the Qing Dynasty; Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Los Angeles, Historical Plays and Urban Discontent in Beijing during the Long Eighteenth Century