Ethnic ChinaLit

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:

The winners of the “2^nd Annual Competition for Screen Plays with an Ethnic Theme”  (第二届少数民族题材优秀影视文学剧本遴选活动) will be announced at the Beijing International Film Festival during April 16-23.  Five winners and twenty Awards for Excellence—for scripts authored in 2009 or later that have never been produced—will be recognized at the event.

Don’t hold your breath if you’re looking for proposals for hard-hitting documentaries, however. According to the guidelines to the competition published at the National Literature Magazine web site, scripts that focus on heroic epics or contemporary themes are both welcome, but should be “forward-looking” ones that foster “prosperity, unity and harmony within the all-China family of ethnicities.”

Taiwan’s Mandarin-free “Seediq Bale”: When will China shoot a feature film entirely in a non-Han language?

The competition is co-sponsored by a host of official bodies including Nationalities Literature Magazine (民族文学).  This is a high-profile publication that claims to be the only “national-level” literary magazine that focuses on writing by authors of who are not Han, and now appears in Han (汉文), Uyghur (维文), Tibetan (藏文), Kazakh (哈文), Mongolian (蒙文) and Korean (朝文).

A citizen of Malaysia and ethnic Chinese who currently resides in South Africa, Tan Twan Eng (陈德黄) has just been awarded the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize:

The winner, The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, revisits the traumatic aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Malaya, and the post-war insurgency against British rule, with stylistic poise and probing intelligence. Taking its aesthetic cues from the artful deceptions of Japanese landscape gardening, it opens up a startling perspective on converging histories, using the feints and twists of fiction to explore its themes of personal and national honour; love and atonement; memory and forgetting; and the disturbing co-existence of cultural refinement and barbarism.

For background on this author in French, see also Un écrivain malaisien pour un prix littéraire britannique?

Tired of rants castigating Mo Yan, the alleged Chinese “government stooge” and recently decorated Nobel Laureate?

Buruma: “A novelist should be judged on literary merit”

Tiresome because most of his critics have read few, if any of his novels in any language; Mo Yan bashing has so far concentrated on the much-awaited criticisms he has not uttered about his government’s shameless censorship policy. With Folk Opera, we get a better educated view from Ian Buruma, who has actually read some of Mo Yan’s novels in both Chinese and English translation.

Writes Buruma:

What gives Mo Yan’s novels their highly idiosyncratic tone is the combination of a great literary imagination and a peasant spirit. Howard Goldblatt’s translations catch this atmosphere brilliantly. The prose reads well in English, without losing a distinctly Chinese feel, but it is very far from the classical Chinese tradition. There is nothing mandarin, or even urbane, about Mo Yan’s work. He has retained the earthy character of rural Shandong, where he grew up in a farming family. Read the rest of this entry »

“ Another contender [for 2013 Man Booker Int’l Prize] is the Chinese novelist Yan Lianke, who has the recommendation of not being well thought of by the regime. His novel, To Serve the People is said to have a theme reminiscent of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and was banned by the authorities. So he can’t be called “a patsy for the regime” – Salman Rushdie’s description of Mo Yan, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. This might make him a popular, as well as perhaps deserving, choice. On the other hand giving both the Nobel and this Man Booker International to Chinese novelists in the same year might seem depressingly to confirm the suspicion that China is indeed taking over the world. ”    (Allan Massie, The Telegraph)

Yan Lianke (阎连科) is one of just 5 authors—and the only Chinese—who has made the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Int’l Prize.

Coming in the wake of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, this poses a thorny PR challenge for the authorities: how do you explain to your people that yes, another of our authors is being (justly!) highlighted in the West, but, um, several of his best works can’t be purchased in the Middle Kingdom?

From mainstream media Chinanews.com’s piece (阎连科入围 “布克国际奖”), we learn all the basics that a Chinese reader unacquainted with the prize might need to know: its history, names of the shortlisted authors in 2013, and so forth. We even get an interview with the author in which he speaks enthusiastically about the recent translation of his novel <受活> (Lenin’s Kisses, tr. Carlos Rojas) and how its popularity has helped raise his profile in the West.

What we don’t hear about—not even a mention, mind you—are the earlier novels which have made a name for him overseas particularly among English, French and German speakers. Specifically, <为人民服务> (Servir le peuple, tr. Claude Payen, and Dem Volke Dienen, tr. Ulrich Kautz),  and <丁庄梦> (Dream of Ding Village, tr. Cindy Carter). Probably because the former is banned in China, and the latter was published only briefly, and then in censored form.

If you’d like to understand how mainstream China media “massaged” initial international coverage of Mo Yan, see Packaging Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for the Masses.

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)

Founded in 2007, the Man Asian Literary Prize—at least to its critics—seemed to have an almost pro-China agenda at times.

Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (狼图腾) took the prize the first time, followed by Su Tong’s The Boat to Redemption (河岸) in 2009, and Three Sisters (玉米) by Bi Feiyu in 2010. Even 2011 saw Yan Lianke’s AIDS masterpiece, Dream of Ding Village (丁庄梦) translated by Cindy Carter, on the shortlist.

But not this time around. The 2012 shortlist is out and no author native to the PRC is on it:

Between Clay and Dust – Musharraf Ali Farooqi (Pakistan)

The Briefcase – Hiromi Kawakami (Japan)

Silent House – Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)

The Garden of Evening Mists – Tan Twan Eng (Malaysia)

Narcopolis – Jeet Thayil (India)

You’d hardly know it, but in late December 2012, the Committee for Promotion of Creative Writing by Zhuang Authors (壮族作家创作促进会) announced the 5 winners of its Zhuang Literature Awards (壮族文学奖) for original writing in Chinese:

Novels

• 《搁浅在夏天的雪》by Ming Mei (明媚)
• 《跨越门槛的一种姿势》by Pan Yingyu (潘莹宇)
• 《叶家老大是农民》by Lu Cheng (路成)

Essays

• 《根是一条河》by Liao Qingtang (廖庆堂)

Poetry

• 《芬芳飞翔的歌谣》by Huang Peng (黄鹏)

Four winners were also given awards for their works written in Zhuang. They are: Shi Caiyi (石才以), Ling Xingning (零兴宁) and Gan Shuowen (甘说文) for novels; Mo Keli (莫克利) for essays; and Meng Yanqun (蒙燕群) for a literary translation from Chinese into Zhuang.

With a population of around 18 million, the Zhuang (壮族) are second in number in China only to the majority Han. Concentrated in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, but also scattered throughout the provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan and Guangdong, the Zhuang are perhaps further along in the acculturation process than the Tibetans and the Uyghurs.

There is an ancient Zhuang script, and the language can be written in Latin letters. However, most Zhuang literature is now penned in Chinese characters. For a good backgrounder on the written language, see Gerard A. Postiglione’s China’s National Minority Education: Culture, State, Schooling and Development . Or check out this free excerpt: Zhuang Language and Literacy.

In 2013, it’s not easy to locate what I’d consider a good overview of Uyghur writing on the Chinese Internet.

Home to perhaps 10 million Uyghurs, the 1.6m sq km Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region accounts for almost one-sixth of China’s territory and borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.  The Chinese government is hyper-sensitive about most anything “Uyghur,” particularly their religion (Islam), and the language, which has Turkic roots unrelated to Han Chinese.

Even so, I’ve found two articles in Chinese which are fairly informative, if dated. One by 祖姆拉提 · 克尤木 that focuses strictly on Uyghur literature in Xinjiang during 1949-2005 (新疆维吾尔文学),  and another by 阿扎提·蘇勒坦 that looks at a broader topic, ethnic literature in Xinjiang (新疆民族文学五十年) since the founding of the autonomous region in 1955.

Here are some factoids cited from the latter essay—all based on the 1955-2005 period—that offer a glimpse of literary “output” of the various non-Han peoples in Xinjiang:

See below for my table listing a selection of Uyghur authors and their works. Read the rest of this entry »