Jan 18
Ethnic ChinaLit Quote of the Week (Jan 18)
Kyrgyz (柯尔克孜族), Mongolian (蒙古族), Quote of the Week, Tibetan (藏族) Add comments. . . the three great epics—the Tibetan “King Gesar,” the Mongol’s “Life of Jangger,” and “Manas” of the Kyrgyz—have all become the object of global studies in the genre. But there is not even a basic introduction to these three epics in our histories of Chinese literature.
Li Xiaofeng in his new piece on The Plight of Native Language Literature among Ethnic Minorities in China (“不在场的在场”：中国少数母语文学的处境，李晓峰著)
January 19th, 2013 at 8:15 am
I was inspired by your blog to attend the Bookworm forum with “Asymptote,” and “Pathlight,” “Chutzpah”. It was quite an interesting event (unlike, I have been told, many other Bookworm events). It was intriguing that Chutzpah recently did an issue on Xinjiang involving Uighur and Kazakh authors. Ou Ning was deeply impressed by the Uighur author Alat Asem. (Copies on sale at the event sold out quickly and I missed out on getting one).
In contrast, Pathlight editor Alice Xin Liu continually spoke of Chinese literature as though it meant only ‘Chinese-language literature’. I asked her afterwards about the unspoken assumption that Chinese literature is automatically in Chinese, when the usual assertion of people steeped in the national ideology is that ‘Chinese does not refer only to Han Chinese’. Her response was that they would love to do an issue of translations from minority languages, but it would be ‘sensitive’ given that Pathlight is a collaboration with People’s Literature magazine (Chinese Writers’ Association). It appears that many of the more important minority ethnic authors have actually been privileged by the system (going to Chinese schools, etc.) and write in Chinese, not in their own ethnic language. So it seems that, despite the Chinese assertion that China is a ‘multi-ethnic state’, the official establishment is highly biased towards using the Chinese language only (Alice used the word ‘homogenised’).
Alice in her talk referred to the continual learning process between themselves and the Chinese Writers’ Association, which operate in very different ways and with different assumptions (for example, the amount of time and effort spent on editing), so I hope that the time will eventually come when the association feels comfortable with publishing translations of stories in non-Chinese languages. While it may currently be anathema to the association from a purely Chinese viewpoint, I feel it would actually do a lot to help the image of China and its literature among foreign readers.