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The Road Not Taken: An Interview with Xue Yiwei Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Lin Gang, Stephen Nashef
In this interview, Lin Gang and Xue Yiwei discuss the latter’s thirty years of literature more or less chronologically, beginning with his first published novella in 1988 and concluding with the publication in 2020 of “King Lear” and Nineteen-Seventy-Nine. Xue reflects on the relationship between his life and his work, his views on literature, and the difficulties he has faced in his career as a writer
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Women Domestic Workers Reveal Secrets of the Trade Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Ma Xiang, Melinda Chen
Rather than simply lamenting migrant workers’ everyday struggles and harsh working conditions, Ma Xiang’s essay seeks to provide a structural analysis of the socioeconomic injustice facing tens of millions of domestic helpers. Strengthening an insider’s plain account with narrative strategies of reportage literature and investigative journalism, this short piece demonstrates migrant workers’ unrecognized
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Three Poems Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Zheng Xiaoqiong, Eleanor Goodman
From the historical to the political to the delicately personal, Zheng Xiaoqiong’s subject matter ranges widely. What remains consistent throughout her work, however, is a commitment to confronting the realities that surround us unflinchingly. As Akira Kurosawa has it, the artist must never avert her eyes. In these poems, Zheng demonstrates that she never does.
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Seven Poems by Wang Jingyun 王景云 Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Wang Jingyun, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Wang Jingyun is a woman migrant worker who has published numerous poems in prestigious poetry journals and anthologies. She is also a member of the Chongqing Writers’ Association. Her poems were collected in the volume River of the Moment (Yi shunjian de heliu). She also likes to sing and dance, and she plays the zither.
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History of a Domestic Worker’s Struggles with Domestic Service Companies Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Dust, Meng Hui
Out of deep concerns for her fellow women workers, Dust published this article to share her hard-earned experiences and strategies of negotiating with profit-minded domestic service companies that had expanded fast by making every possible effort to exploit workers’ labor. Dust’s article was published at Jianjiao buluo’s social media platform under the title “A Drifting Domestic Woman Worker” (“Beipiao
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Wandering the Garden, Waking from a Dream Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Carlos Rojas
Through a comparative analysis of Yan Lianke’s The Day the Sun Died with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lu Xun’s almost precisely contemporaneous collection Call to Arms, this essay considers the ways in which Yan Lianke’s novel uses motifs of death and “dreamwalking” to reflect on more abstract processes of representation and textual mediation. In particular, this essay argues that the trope of somnambulism
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Do Not Write Poetry with Silence Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Mai Mang
Poet Mai Mang presents a journey across time and across the Pacific and the North American continent, from the Bell and Drum Towers to Angel Island and to Hart Island. Mai Mang also discusses a poetics of silence. He confesses that he has become accustomed to listening to the voices buried in silence and wants to preserve these voices, or silence, in his own poems. Ultimately, the kind of poetry he
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Bell and Drum Towers: Five Poems Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Mai Mang
Poet Mai Mang 麦芒 translates five poems of his own into English. These poems, “Bell and Drum Towers” and “Hart Island” included, treat silence as an indispensable part of history and reality residing within us, regardless of where or who we are. In the last poem, “Another Discourse on Why I Write Poetry,” Mai Mang deliberately asserts: “Writing poetry is in order to not speak.” Because, as he sees it
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Secrets, Confrontation, and Alienation Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Hong Zhang, Yvette Zhu
In this interview, writer Zhu Wenying spoke to Zhang Hong, the Deputy Editor in Chief of Guangzhou Literature and Art Newspaper, about her earlier writings and what her earlier work attempted to accomplish.
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Ten Years in Eleven Chapters Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Wenying Zhu, Yvette Zhu
Zhu Wenying was born in Shanghai in the 1970s. In this self-interview from early in her career, she writes eleven short essays to answer questions ranging from the meaning of literature to her inspirations and influences, love and music, the passage of time and its effect on her development as a writer and her writing. She also ruminates on what is writing and how to be a writer. This interview is
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Soirée in the Spring Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Wenying Zhu, Yvette Zhu
“Soirée in the Spring” was first published in Zuojia in 2016. The story takes place in Berlin and Shanghai and follows the love affair of a young academic. In a society where the shadow of class stratification is as dense as the intoxicating fog on riverbanks, the young academic slowly wakes up from the illusion of love to the reality of life. As the story unfolds, she must find a way to penetrate
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The Small Endless Sorrow of the South Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2021-09-29 Qinghua Zhang, Yvette Zhu
In this short essay, Zhang Qinghua discourses on three aspects of Zhu Wenying’s novel Aunt Lili’s Small South (Lili yima de xixiao nanfang 莉莉姨妈的细小南方). He argues that the ineluctable qualities of the novel lie within its juxtaposition of small history and grand history through the protagonist Aunt Lili and the first-person narrator. By doing so, Zhu Wenying has given us a re-telling of the persistent
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Elsewhere, or the Perpetual Contradiction of Being Stuck in the Mud and Floating Free Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2021-04-07 Min Lu, Chao Xing, Kristopher Pickett
In this conversation, interviewer Xing Chao speaks with Jiangsu writer Lu Min about the transformative experiences that thrust her into the world of literature. Lu Min talks in detail about her life’s trajectory, her most famous works, and the inspirations behind them. Lu Min also expounds upon the influences of her generation’s literature and the relationship between the individual and their generation
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Deep Breaths: Collected Poems of Mi Jialu, 1981–2018 Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2019-07-03 Emily Goedde
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Boundary-Crossing Experiments Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2019-07-03 Yueqin Zhai, Josh Stenberg
This article delineates the different operational models that have been in use in Shanghai’s “avant-garde” theater in the twenty-first century. Where ZhenHan Café struggled to reconcile market demands with artistic vision, Downstream Garage mobilized market resources. Grass Stage has used avant-garde techniques in order to stage contemporary social realities, while Niao Collective has focused on “liminal”
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Lu Xun Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2019-07-03 Li Jing, David N. C. Hull
This selection from the play Lu Xun is from one of the most climactic scenes of the play. It explores the core of the playwright Li Jing’s concept of Lu Xun’s ideals. In this passage, he struggles with the implications of freedom and sacrifice, and the possibility of humanity in the midst of violence and vengeance. All the while, other forces manipulate him for their own goals.
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Jin Yong and the Kungfu Industrial Complex Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2019-07-03 Paul B. Foster
This article is a general introduction to the cultural impact of Jin Yong’s works beyond original serialization as they contribute to the construction of the “kungfu industrial complex”—a complicated, multi-dimensional cultural/business matrix related to the production and consumption of Jin Yong’s (and other martial arts writers’) works and legacy. Three selected overlapping areas of impact of Jin
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Four Poems Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Li Dewu, Jenny Chen, Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas
Li Dewu’s poems are a species of surreal Buddhist allegory as a response to the spiritual degradation of contemporary society. Typically, his poetry creates a sense of mystery and transformative possibilities in its restless aspiration for moments of tranquility.
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Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Maghiel van Crevel
This essay offers some impressions of a grassroots literature group and the multifaceted nongovernmental organization of which it is a part: the Migrant Workers Home based in Picun, in the suburbs ...
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Four Poems Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Huang Chunming, Tze-lan Sang
Four poems in Huang’s characteristically direct and moving language are translated here. “Silvergrass” depicts an ordinary plant and a commonplace scene at a traditional market in an imaginative language that evokes fairytales. “My Vegetarian and Sutra-chanting Grandmother” explores musicality through rhythmic repetition and onomatopoeia. “Turtle Island” conveys urban alienation and Huang’s nostalgia
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Four Poems Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Mi Jialu, Lucas Klein, Michael Day, Matt Turner, Haiying Weng
These four poems by Mi Jialu show a personal contemplation on the torturous human condition Inflicted by historical traumas, environmental crisis, and diasporic alienation. Through a gaze of a surreal lens, the poet seeks to express the inexpressible haunted by memory, dreams, and ghosts. With a more psychological quest, the poet embarks on a journey into the heart of darkness for self-redemption and
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Six Poems Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Hu Jiujiu, Matt Turner, Haiying Weng
Hu Jiujiu has said that the collection of 100 poems called Fog, from which these poems are taken, was an experiment in resuscitating various images from the Eastern tradition and breathing them into the sundry spiritual crises of modernity. The sequence is illustrative of what he imagined to be a moment in time, where contemporaneity meets a horizon of transcendence. The six selected poems carry the
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Ai Wei the Writer Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2018-07-03 Wang Kan, Tera Mills
Scholar Wang Kan conducts an analysis of Ai Wei’s works and narrative style. The narrative is examined in light of the theme of compassion commonly found in Ai Wei’s works, taking several examples from his works The Murderer Wang Ken, The Sun Is Shining, and “Country Movies.” Then Wang Kan analyzes what he terms “negative affirmation,” a type of rhetoric used by Ai Wei to examine human nature through
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The Dimensions of the Future Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2018-07-03 Dai Jinhua, Chenshu Zhou
In this article, Dai Jinhua problematizes the notion of the future in our current age of global capitalism. Her central question is “do we still have a future?” She connects the proliferation of end-of-the-world imagination in world cinema with an underlying sense of crisis that has spread across the world since the end of the Cold War. The end of the world in filmic representations, she observes,
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The Spectral Space beyond Borders in Recent Chinese Films Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Zhuoyi Wang
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Editor’s Note Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Ping Zhu
The present volume “Nanomaterials: Basic Concepts and Applications”, as the title suggests, deals with basic concepts and applications of nanomaterials, a buzz word in the modern world of Science and Technology. Because of advanced characterization and new fabrication techniques, nanomaterials are now central to multiple disciplines, including materials science, chemistry, physics, engineering and
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Married to Rivers: An Interview with Wang Ping Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Xin Yang, Wang Ping
Wang Ping talks to Xin Yang about her life as a writer, poet, artist, photographer, and professor. In their conversation, Wang Ping discusses her most recent award-wining book and Kinship of Rivers, the interdisciplinary art project she initiated. She reflects on her own connection with rivers and mountains, on human-nature relationships, on ecological crisis, and on social engagement. She explores
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The Fundamental Nature of the Universe Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Han Song, Nathaniel Isaacson
An artificial intelligence (AI) system housed in a supercomputer meets an alien being who serves as the messenger of the Guardian, an overseer of universal order. In conversing with the alien, the supercomputer comes to understand that nihilism born of ennui is a universal phenomenon. Instead of the doomsday scenarios AI researchers have warned us of, in which sentient algorithms conclude that a human
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Sky Earth Human: Five Poems Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Wang Ping
This selection of poems, written in English, represents the latest work by Wang Ping in 2017 and 2018. The poems are from an as-yet unpublished manuscript titled “The River in Our Blood,” which is a continuation of Wang Ping’s relationship with the landscape of rivers and mountains as explored in her recent wide-ranging interdisciplinary art project, The Kinship of Rivers.
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Mothers and Daughters: Orphanage as Method Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Carlos Rojas
Published in 1986, one of Wang Anyi’s earliest books consists of the journals that she and her mother, Ru Zhijuan, kept during their stay at the Iowa International Writing Program in Fall of 1983. This essay uses Wang Anyi’s relationship with her mother as an entry point into a broader consideration of Wang Anyi’s oeuvre, arguing that Wang explores this relationship in a displaced manner in several
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Record of Regret Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Xi Dong, Dylan Levi King
Themes of politics and cleanliness, and lust and punishment are introduced in this excerpt of Dong Xi’s Record of Regret. The selection acquaints us with the character of Ceng Guangxian, a child who lives in a warehouse once owned by his grandfather but confiscated during Liberation in 1949. The novel opens with a scene involving two dogs copulating, a moment of rare amusement during a dark time in
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Life without Language Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Xi Dong, Dylan Levi King
Dong Xi’s first major novella, published first in Harvest in 1996, winner of the Lu Xun National Excellent Novella Award, and adapted into a CCTV-8 television series in 2009 (as Sky Lovers) takes the form of a modern parable, telling the story of Wang Jiakuan, who is deaf; Wang Laobing, who is blinded in an accident; and Cai Yuzhen, who cannot speak. Wang Jiakuan and Cai Yuzhen meet and fall in love
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Reckless Writing Is the Best Writing: An Interview with Dong Xi Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Xi Dong, Er Fu, Dylan Levi King
A wide-ranging discussion between author Dong Xi and academic Fu Er, conducted at Guangxi University for Nationalities on June 29, 2012. They discussed Dong Xi’s life and work, including Dong Xi’s childhood in rural Guangxi and how it shaped his writing, key literary influences such as Franz Kafka and Raymond Carver, the editing process, Günter Grass, social messages in his fiction, minimalism, social
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From Appalachia to Liangshan: Translation, Collaboration, and the Research of Mark Bender Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2016-09-01 Timothy Thurston
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The Cartoon Cat and Postmodern Poetry Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2016-09-01 Ya Shi,Nick Admussen
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Tight Corsets and the Narrativity of Poetry Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2016-09-01 Ya Shi,Nick Admussen
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Voice Change Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2016-09-01 Xu Zechen, Charles A. Laughlin
Xu Zechen's harrowing tale “Voice Change” depicts the tumultuous world of the Cultural Revolution from the vantage point of a young pupil of the kind village teacher, Old He. Our young narrator, still waiting for his voice to change, is stunned to find out that not only has the revered teacher been singled out for a violent public “struggle session,” but that he is also accused of indecency for rescuing
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On Myths and Riddles Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2016-09-01 Chu T'ien-wen, Ping Zhu
Chu weaves an eclectic tapestry of culture through the personal history and musings of her mentor, Hu Lancheng, and his estranged ex-wife, the acclaimed Eileen Chang. Modern and ancient philosophy from both East and West, alongside myths, religions, modern science, and literature, all form a synthetic unity of humanity and the world. Originally published as the sixth essay in Chu T'ien-wen's memoir
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Mountain Songs from the Heavens Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2016-09-01 Han Shaogong, Lucas Klein
From the mind of the Newman Prize laureate Han Shaogong comes the tale of a relationship between a virtuoso peasant musician, Old Yin, who is from the rural settlement of Bianshan Cavern, and the county's orchestra conductor, Mr. Liu, who cannot believe what he hears. Could the extraordinary music Yin composes possibly be his own? Who is this Old Yin? Could he be a living master?
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A Flurry of Blessings Chinese Literature Today Pub Date : 2016-09-01 Chi Zijian, Eleanor Goodman
Chi Zijian paints a kindhearted tale of a tireless working-class couple whose steadfast love for one another provides them with a bountiful life and keeps them warm against the harsh winter backdrop of poverty and constant, back-breaking labor.