My Destiny is the third Liang Xiaosheng book brought into English translation, but the first novel. It follows the short story collection The Black Button published by Panda Books in 1992, and the memoir Confessions of a Red Guard from the University of Hawai’i Press in 2018. The latter and My Destiny are both translations by Howard Goldblatt, easily the foremost among Chinese-to-English literary translators of his time. My Destiny will arrive in English publication from China Books six years after its publication in Chinese, and one year after a television adaptation.
Author: Angus Stewart
In a 2019 interview with Words Without Borders alongside her translator Natascha Bruce, Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse said, “I believe experimenting with language brings insight to any type of writing.” Later in the interview, Bruce remarks, “There is usually a playful element to Dorothy’s work, coexisting with—or perhaps contributing to—a deeply sinister one.”
In her 1944 essay “Writing of One’s Own”, Eileen Chang wrote “I do not like heroics. I like tragedy and, even better, desolation”. Twenty-one years earlier, in his speech “What happens after Nora leaves home?”, discussing the ending of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Lu Xun raised the awkward question of what will become of a woman after her liberation if she has no viable means to support herself materially.
Think of Cold War communist insurgency and guerilla warfare might well spring to mind. Sometimes it worked, building from the hinterlands to capture the capital: see Cuba. Sometimes it failed: see Che in Bolivia. And sometimes the revolutionaries remained stuck in the wild, undefeated but unable to seize the state.
Fifteen years have passed between the publication of Hon Lai Chu’s 《缝身》 (“Seam”) and Mending Bodies, its English translation by Jacqueline Leung. Readers who feel those years mark a drift toward dystopia may detect the eerie touch of prophecy in Hon’s writing. Yet she also digs into human problems with neither expiration date nor borders.
You must be logged in to post a comment.