Bruce Humes

How do you sell more than 3 million copies of a serialized novel in China? Biwa Kwan of Global Times talks to the publisher behind The Tibet Code (藏地密码) phenomenon:

When 36-year-old marketer Hua Nan came up with the idea of “selling books like toothpaste” it provoked strong reactions from within the publishing industry. “People would get angry and curse at me,” said Hua, who founded Dook Publishing with publisher Wu You. “They thought that comparing books to toothpaste was vulgar and cheap.”

By applying the “unique selling proposition” theory developed by Rosser Reeves, chairman of US advertising company Ted Bates, Hua Nan developed his marketing strategy of product differentiation based on the use of symbols in cover designs.

Scouring the internet for untapped talent, Dook Publishing discovered He Ma’s work, The Last Temple, deeming it a prime candidate for a design makeover.

The book was quickly re-titled The Tibet Code, emphasizing the story’s Tibet subject matter. Design changes included the use of multi-colored stripes – a common motif in Tibetan traditional costume – on the spine of the novel and the use of red and pink font in the title.

If you’re interested in the Tibet craze in China and how this dovetails with official Chinese government policy, see also King Gesar: Marketing China’s Tibet.

Inspired by the death of his own father and the Chinese novel Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp (夹边沟记事) by Yang Xianhui (扬显惠), director Wang Bin (王宾) has shot a film that ranks high among the contenders for the Golden Lion Prize to be awarded later this week at the 67th Venice Film Festival. Ironically, viewers in the West can now watch the film which is unlikely to be shown legally in the PRC any time in the near future, so sensitive is the topic—how China used labor camps to isolate and even starve to death those who dared criticize the Communist Party and its policies in the late 1950s.

Yahoo.com reports:

A powerful Chinese film on the plight of political prisoners condemned to forced labor camps in the late 1950s wooed critics in Venice on Monday, with some tipping it as a strong contender for the festival’s top prize.

“The Ditch” [夹边沟] tells the little-known story of some 3,000 people deported for “re-education” to labor camps on the edge of the Gobi desert, in western China, and struggling to survive extreme climate and acute food shortages.

Billed as right-wing enemies by the government for even mildly criticizing the Communist party or simply because of their background, many died of starvation, disease and exhaustion in the ditches that served as dormitories.

Not quite sure what to make of this, but looks like another “lost in translation” classic:

“After reading Xi Jue (西决), I was surprised by Li’s writing skills. I must say that Xi Jue is not an interesting novel, but I was totally involved in it,” said Su. (Zheng Yi at Global Times quoting veteran author Su Tong (苏童) on young writer Li Di’an (笛安) and her best-seller, Memory in the City of Dragon I (西决)).

Fan Wen (范稳), the Chinese Catholic author who recently completed his fictional trilogy spotlighting cultural and religious collisions in the “multicultural wonderland” of the Yunnan-Tibet border, now has another historical novel in mind.

The first book in the published series, Harmonious Land (水乳大地), recounts the tale of a multi-ethnic settlement in Lancangjiang Canyon (gateway to Tibet), beset by battles between arrogant French Catholic missionaries, incompetent officials and their marauding troops, Naxi Dongba Shamanists, and the dominant Tibetans, not all of whom lead pacific, vegetarian lives in the local lamasery.

Chinese Books, English Reviews spoke with Fan Wen about his new work-in-progress:

Q: Word has it that you’re working on a new novel about the rail line linking China’s Kunming and Vietnam’s Haiphong that was constructed during French colonial rule of Indochina. How are you preparing for this project?

A: Yes, it’s about this railroad that’s soon to be completely abandoned. I rather enjoy the ‘history of decline’. It gives one a certain sense of desolation. After the Yunnan-Vietnam railway was completed [1910], it actually brought with it the collision and fusion of two distinct civilizations. The railway passed through the lands of several of Yunnan’s ethnic minorities, whose cultures were more backward than that of the Tibetans, and even more vulnerable. I intend to use several French nationals who were working on the railroad as the main characters. I’ll write about their lives in a foreign land, and their experiences against the backdrop of that alien culture, including the dangers they faced, their loves and their fates.

I’ve already read a lot of background material, conducted interviews along the line, and even stayed in the old train stations. I’m conceptualizing the story right now. [end]

Director Feng Xiaogang’s gaze graces the cover of several publications this week, and indeed, the “disaster movie” genre in China may never be the same again thanks to him.  His adaptation of Zhang Ling’s Aftershock (张翎的 “余震”) is mesmerizing the nation’s moviegoers, and this tale of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake that killed over 200,000 leaves many drenched in tears.

Even Time is writing about the new film, the first IMAX film ever shot outside the US, based on the fictional work by the Chinese-Canadian author. Here’s Time’s synopsis of the plot:

As if a deadly earthquake weren’t devastating enough, a Tangshan mother is forced to decide between saving her son or daughter.Both are trapped under a collapsed building, and rescuers can reach only one of them before the structure topples. She chooses the son, but, unbeknownst to her, the daughter miraculously survives. With her mother’s betrayal fresh in her ears, the little girl flees her family and is raised by a husband and wife in the People’s Liberation Army. Thirty-two years later, she travels to help victims of the earthquake in Sichuan. There she sees how another mother is forced to make a similar choice, and the experience changes her appraisal of the past.

I haven’t read the book or seen the movie (唐山大地震), but I just read a fascinating interview in the weekly SMW (2010.7.26 南都周刊), that offers insights into how the movie script was conceived: From Cold Novel to Warm Movie (从冷小说到暖电影).

As you read my translated excerpt (below) from SMW’s interview with Su Xiaowei (苏小卫)—the screenwriter for Aftershock, pictured above—keep in mind that she also puts in two days a week at the Film Review Board, i.e., she works for the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the body that enforces China’s censorship guidelines.

(Note: Words inside quotation marks below are quotes from Su Xiaowei cited by the author of the article, Chen Yu (陈雨)).

The excerpt:

Besides [changes to] the structure of the story, the movie also “performed major surgery” on the theme; the basic tone of the story was altered from one of darkness and pain, to one of warmth and hope [in the film]. The novelist Zhang Ling intended to convey that even after the disaster was over, the ravaged land gradually flattened and structures rebuilt, the blood from the wounds scratched open by the earthquake in the souls of children continued to ooze silently long thereafter.

The novel emphasizes the description of how the daughter, Fang Deng, undergoes a “series of post-earthquake disasters”: her adopted mother dies, she’s molested by her adopted father, her husband falls in love with another woman, her daughter leaves home, she finds herself in a hospital unit for psychological therapy, and tries to commit suicide several times.  These somber and cruel events reflect the fate assigned to the female protagonist by Zhang Ling: Having lived through an earthquake, Fang Deng’s soul is veiled in darkness, her personality has become skewed, she cannot return to her family nor can she live a normal life. The novel leaves the reader downcast and tearful.

But “the movie is much more heart-warming, and cuts parts such as the adopted father’s sexual aggression, the husband’s infidelity and the departure of her daughter,” says Su Xiaowei. “Much more of the story is devoted to describing daily life and warmhearted emotions. After the earthquake, people overcome their grief, regain a sense of calm, and get on with their lives.”

“Film is a mass medium that speaks to greater numbers of viewers, and it’s not like a book that represents a more ‘personalized’ account,” says Su Xiaowei.  “After all, a film should offer a sense of warmth and consolation.” At the outset, Su Xiaowei was told quite clearly by the director and producer that she was to write a script for a film that would warm the hearts of the audience, not a film that would hurt their feelings and leave them in despair. The film should “cure” the daughter of her hatred for her mother.

In order to create a heart-warming theme, the movie not only cut the scene in which the adopted father violates Fang Deng, it also recasts the adopted parents as People’s Liberation Army soldiers.

“All these requirements were decided after discussion with the producer,” says Su Xiaowei frankly. “We didn’t reject a melodramatic approach to the story, but everyday life can also fully express a person’s emotions. In everyday life, the great majority of fathers would not molest their adopted daughter. We chose to represent good relations between the father and adopted daughter as in a normal life. And our film is not rated—adults and children can view it—so we intentionally altered this part.” [end excerpt]

The China Daily features a piece on the third and final novel in a trilogy exploring the border on either side of Yunnan and Tibet:

At last author Fan Wen (范稳) has his reward for a decade of immersion in the multicultural wonderland along the Yunnan-Tibet border: Canticle to the Land (大地雅歌), the closing novel in his longish trilogy, has just been published in Chinese.

Why locate the tale there? “It’s my own ‘creative paradise’, an inspiration of sorts,” explains Fan, a devout Catholic from Sichuan province. “You can interpret this as a summons from God, or as a writer who has been vanquished by a certain spirituality, the cultures and beliefs of the people of this realm.”

That day in 1999 when he came across the “lonely” grave of a martyred Swiss missionary in Lancangjiang Canyon, Father Maurice Tornay, he realized he had found his “sacred vocation”. Indeed, the area straddling the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan and Tibet autonomous region is an anthropologist’s dream. One finds Tibetans, Han, Naxi, Yi, Lisu and other ethnic groups living together.

“I find describing the interaction – and collisions – between different cultures a challenging and engaging affair,” Fan says. “Conflicts have taken place due to differences in culture and faith, like wars between Naxi and Tibetans, and Tibetans and Han. Irreconcilable contradictions occurred between Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism when the latter was introduced.”

Julia Lovell, translator of Lu Xün’s The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China, on the therapeutic qualities of the author:

With the PRC now in its swaggering 60s, I would prescribe – to counter the excesses of Beijing bombast – a stiff dose of Lu Xun: for his intensely crafted, sympathetic insights into the blackness of modern China; and as a biographical lesson in the Communist party’s energetic, though unsuccessful efforts to neutralise the country’s critical conscience.

Read the full text of China’s Conscience in The Guardian.

March 27 Update: Gray Tan has informed Chinese Books, English Reviews that the Italian-language rights have just been purchased by Corbaccio (Longanesi Group).

The Dutch-language  rights to Right Bank of the Argun (额尔古纳河右岸) by Chi Zijian (迟子建)  been sold to Heleen Bluth of House of Books, in a pre-empt, by Marianne Schonbach Literary Agency on behalf of Barbara J Zitwer and Gray Tan at The Grayhawk Agency.

The novel is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of an aging Evenki woman in the last years of the 20th century. She chooses to stay behind when her tribe abandons the forested mountains of Northeast China for “civilized” life among town dwellers, where their beloved reindeer will be cooped up like cattle.

A best seller in China last year, Right Bank of the Argun won the 7th Annual Mao Dun Literary Award in 2008.

Read more about the Evenki at Wikipedia, or see my translation of an excerpt from the author’s Afterword. To contact Gray Tan, e-mail: grayhawk@grayhawk-agency.com

M.A. Orthofer, managing editor of The Complete Review, on just how far one should go in “repackaging” a work of translated fiction:

Amazon.com: To what extent can you forgive a bad translation of a good book? And can you see the quality peeking through?

M.A. Orthofer: A bit of forgiveness is always necessary: the process of translation always seems to entail some (and often a lot of) loss, and there are many days and books where I think it’s only a matter of…degrees of badness. My personal preference is for a more literal translation, where you can ‘hear’ the original (language) through the translation, as it were, even if that can sound awkward in English. Most publishers and editors (and, I guess, translators) prefer to English (or Americanize) the texts, which I suppose makes them more readable–though when the approach goes wrong the results can be pretty disastrous. (What I find more problematic, however, is when there is more extensive editorial interference at the translation stage, and books are ‘reshaped’ (generally by trimming away a lot) for the English-language market–Wang Gang’s English is one example from last year’s crop of books.)

For a review of the book and an interview with the translators: Growing up Han in a Fictional Xinjiang.

Attention, provocation et talent… un recueil de courts romans, « I Love Dollars » de Zhu Wen, un écrivain chinois peu connu mais qui a eu l’honneur d’être édité par l’Université de Columbia, vient d’être traduit en Français. D’autres publications sont envisagées, même si, désormais, l’auteur se consacre surtout au cinéma.