Ethnic ChinaLit

Mo Yan (left) and fellow Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo

Nobel-winning writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”? Misinterpreted visionary? Or just a government stooge?

You decide.  Ah, yes, don’t forget to read one of his novels first! But in the meantime, here’s a factoid to chew on:

In Dec. 2012, 14 of his novels figured on the authoritative list of Top 30 Best Selling Works of Fiction in China compiled by OpenBook (开卷排行)

Chinese émigré author Yiyun Li—raised in the PRC, now in the US—shows why mainland authors would probably prefer their works be critiqued by Westerners who hold Things Chinese in greater awe (Pow! By Mo Yan—Review ):

Has the Nobel laureate used filth and fabulism to avoid politics in his latest novel?

Late last year, the Chinese writer Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. His status as a Party favourite in China and his statement comparing censorship to airport security – viewed as witty in the Chinese media and a blunder in the west – pushed him to centre stage, and rekindled the perennial debate on the relationship between politics and literature.

Pow! is his first novel to appear in English since the Nobel honour. Politics aside, this book seems to represent everything that has gone amiss in Mo Yan’s work, and perhaps in a broader way what has gone awry in China’s literature of the last 30 years. In the 1990s, Wang Xiaobo, a Chinese writer with millions of followers, famously stated that writing was like masturbation for him – something done out of an inexpressible urge and ending with a pleasurable emptiness. Disturbing or entertaining as the statement might sound, Mo Yan, the most prestigious writer at the moment in China, seems to have confirmed that observation. Pow! reads like public masturbation; at times laughable, in the end it reminds readers that such an act should be done in private rather than in print.

The 24-strong group of judges has announced the shortlist for the “National Literature Magazine Annual Awards” (2012 《民族文学》年度奖), as follows (eligible works must have been published in 2012 editions of the magazine):

“2012 National Literature Magazine Awards”

《民族文学》年度奖

Published in Chinese Edition

Published in Minority Language Editions Read the rest of this entry »

“La tradition millénaire du mandarinat a eu une conséquence imprévue ces dernières années: le développement d’un nouveau genre littéraire: la bureaucratie romanesque,” écrit Bertrand Mialaret à mychinesebooks.com:

Wang Xiaofang [王晓方] va avoir cinquante ans. Pendant deux ans, il fut le secrétaire du vice maire de Shenyang, Ma Xiandong, qui fut condamné et exécuté pour avoir joué trois millions de dollars d’argent public dans les casinos de Macau en 2001. Cet épisode, bien qu’il fut hors de cause, a mis un terme à sa carrière administrative.

Après quatre romans à succès sur les fonctionnaires et la bureaucratie, il est considéré comme le maître du genre. Chacun de ses livres se vend à plusieurs centaines de milliers d’exemplaires et, en 2007, « The chief of the Beijing liaison office » [驻京办主任] a dépassé le million .

Actuellement, avec l’affaire Bo Xilai, la situation est plus difficile; les éditeurs sont prudents. Il a quatre livres en attente de publication et les projets de film sont gelés pour le moment. La corruption est un sujet délicat. . .

Mo Yan’s “Frogs” (蛙，莫言著), a novel that “traces the life of a midwife who witnesses forced late-term abortions, forced sterilization and other horrors” of China’s family forced downsizing planning program, may be available in Arabic no later than mid-2014, according to an October 10 news item published by Chinanews.com (中阿互译优秀作品).

The novel, already available in French (see right), is one of 5 Chinese works shortlisted by the Algerian side for translation in a Sino-Algerian government-sponsored project that aims to see 25 books translated from the Chinese into Arabic, and another 25 in the opposite direction.

For an excerpt from Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Frogs (the full novel is not out yet), see Oct 11 Granta.

The other 4 works on the Arabic-bound shortlist: Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu (围城，钱钟书著), Chinese Gourmet Cooking (中国美食), Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (狼图腾，姜戎著), and Wang Gang’s English (英格力士，王刚著).

On October 10, the New York Times reported on the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Chinese writer Mo Yan (莫言). As might be expected for positive coverage of this momentous event by a respected American newspaper, In China, a Writer Finds a Deep Well has quickly been translated, re-packaged and served up to the masses in the October 13, 2012 print edition of Cankao Xiaoxi (参考消息) as 美报细述莫言作品特点.

Cankao Xiaoxi is a respected and influential 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 little or no content is added. But references deemed unbecoming to China’s image are often “airbrushed.” It targets working-class men over 30, many of whom still prefer to get their daily news fix from the state-run TV or newspapers.

As usual in my pieces on Cankao Xiaoxi, I run the original English copy immediately below. For the benefit of English speakers who cannot read the Chinese version published and distributed throughout China, I cross out the English words that were deleted when the article was translated into Chinese, and indicate any added copy (normally just for readability’s sake) by putting it [in brackets]. This way one can better see how Cankao’s editors “package” foreign copy for domestic consumption.

In this case, three specific types of content were deleted when the NY Times article was rendered for the masses:

• Any hint that Mo Yan is a “dissident” writer
• The sole mention of Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese writer—not Mo Yan, actually—to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature
• References to the excesses of corrupt officials that occasionally people Mo Yan’s fictional world

White Deer Plain, a newly launched movie based on Chen Zhongshi’s novel of the same name (白鹿原, 陈忠实著), has aroused controversy both as a book and as a film.

The novel tells the tale of two families, Bai and Lu, living through the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the beginning of the Republic and the rise of Communism in Shaanxi Province. It won the Mao Dun Literary Prize in 1997, but as documented in an article today (删改性写), not before the sensitive political content and sex scenes were appropriately trimmed:

《白鹿原》曾因其尖锐的历史政治观点及大胆的性爱描述，在竞选第四届茅盾文学奖前进行过一定程度的编辑和删减。据人民文学出版社副总编辑何启治(《白鹿 原》首版编辑)回忆，当时评委会负责人打电话给陈忠实，转述了一些评委要求他进一步修订作品的意见。这些意见主要认为：书中关于政治斗争的若干描写可能引 起误解，应以适当方式予以廓清；另外，一些与表现思想主题无关的较为直露的性描写应加以修改。陈忠实随后对《白鹿原》进行了适当修改。

Which makes you wonder: which version of the novel were Baoqing Shao and Solange Cruveillé working from when they translated the novel into French (Au pays du Cerf blanc)?

The New York Times reports (A Telling Language Lesson):

HONG KONG — A new chief executive took the oath of office in Hong Kong on Sunday morning, and then, somewhat astoundingly, he made his inaugural speech in Mandarin.

Leung Chun-ying did not speak a single syllable of Cantonese, which the government says is spoken by 89 percent of the people here. Hong Kong’s official languages are listed as English and the indeterminate “Chinese.”

Liu Liu (六六), the writer who brought us Snail Dwelling (蜗居), the best-seller—and controversial TV series—portraying the frustrations of China’s emerging class of urban “mortgage slaves” (房奴), has just launched a novel that takes us inside a Chinese hospital.

Having been badly knifed by a mugger on the street and then left virtually unattended for several hours in a hallway in a Shenzhen hospital back in 2001, I’m relieved to say that her Angel Heart (心术) doesn’t focus on emergency care. That would be a bit, uh, grim.

According to an interview in Chinese with Southern Metropolis Weekly (“六六：我也是良知的一部分”), Liu Liu researched the topic on the ground over six months at several sites, including Shanghai’s well-known Huashan Hospital.

Just how hard hitting the novel will be remains to be seen, however. Snail Dwelling raised the ire of many real estate developers, and at one point the TV series was banned in several cities. But public anger at private property developers is one thing, while criticism of medical services in China—still largely a state monopoly—would be quite another.  Says Liu Liu in the interview:

“There are plenty of dark sides to a hospital, but I didn’t try expressly to expose those eye-catching aspects. I can say that the [medical] system is not a good one, but within the foreseeable future, that won’t change much. Even if we can’t do more things to push for change, what we can do is to try to ensure that relations between people do not become more aggravated.”

First published in April 2010, Each Leaf a Bodhi Tree: My 15 Years at Dunhuang (一叶一菩提——我在敦煌十五年), a memoir detailing how Buddhist grottos in northwestern China were saved from marauding Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, has been formally banned from further publication and distribution in China. Reports the Global Times:

” A most cautionary example in the history of Dunhuang’s exploitation occurred when a 19th century Taoist priest named Wang Yuanlu, who after discovering thousands of ancient scrolls crammed in a small cave, sold them off to foreign adventurers, including British explorer Aurel Stein, French linguist and Sinologist Paul Pelliot and American art historian Langdon Warner. The scrolls were priceless translations attributed to the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled to India via the Silk Road in 629 AD to bring Buddhist scriptures to China.

Despite heads of the institutes suffering persecution for years, namely Chang Shuhong, the grottoes remained unscathed, according to 73-year-old Xiao Mo, a prestigious architectural scholar who spent 15 years in Dunhuang.

Xiao published “Each Leaf a Bodhi Tree: My Fifteen Years at Dunhuang” in April, which features Dunhuang during the Culture Revolution.

“I wanted to reflect on the truth and reveal a glorious act of humanity during a tragic period in history. Unfortunately, I was informed that the book was banned from being distributed, promoted or reprinted,” he told the Global Times yesterday. “I don’t understand why and am saddened.”

Managers from Wangfujing and Xinhua Bookstores in Beijing both commented that they received no official announcement of a ban on Xiao’s work. When asked as to why they have been off the shelves for two weeks, the managers explained they were simply “out of stock.”

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), author Xiao Mo (萧默) who worked at the Dunhuang Research Institute for Cultural Relics in Gansu from 1963 to 1978, seeks a publisher for the book—now available only in Chinese—in Hong Kong. Reports the SCMP:

“Early this month, Xiao was delighted to find out that his book, published in April, had almost sold out on online bookstores and requested a reprint from the publisher.

His publisher told him in e-mails on August 4 and 8 that the head of the publishing house was interrogated by officials of the Central Publicity Department as to why the book had been published and about the whole process of publishing. Some editors were forced to write self-criticisms. A few days later, they received the order from Gapp banning the reprint.

An editor at the publishing house confirmed the ban and said the order came in July after all 5,000 copies had been distributed.

“The feedback I received from readers was that the plot was very intriguing,” Xiao said. “I’m only focusing on positive humanity during the Cultural Revolution, when some grass-roots leaders tried their best to protect people with their power. “I tried very hard to avoid violence and even used my sense of humour. It’s a whole new angle and a breakthrough in covering the Cultural Revolution. I have no idea at all why it was banned.”