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.
China
Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not really Muslim.
Wu Ming-Yi is one of Taiwan’s most celebrated contemporary writers, whose work bridges literature, environmental thought, and history with a global perspective. The Wu Ming-Yi Companion, edited by Michael Berry and Kuei-fen Chiu, is the first comprehensive volume in English dedicated to his oeuvre, offering new scholarship from leading researchers across Taiwan, Hong Kong, North America, and Europe. It also includes an essay by Wu himself and illustrations selected by Wu.
In In Search of Green China, Ma Tianjie traces how China has achieved impressive net progress towards its environmental goals, including cleaner air and water, and hard targets for peak greenhouse gas emissions, while at the same time closing the political space that once allowed citizens, NGOs, and journalists to shape that progress. The result, he suggests, is a greener China whose achievements are real, but whose silenced civil society leaves its environmental future more brittle and less just—even if some in Beijing would argue that fewer voices have made environmental policy more coherent.
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.”
Dan Wang’s Breakneck opens with an assertion that will immediately ring true with many observers of both China and the United States: despite their ongoing sparring, “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese”.
The Myanmar-China border stretches for over 2,000 kilometres between China’s Yunnan Province and Myanmar’s Kachin and Shan States. The border has long been a site of migration, trade and cultural exchange, and became a particularly significant area of escape during periods of political and economic hardship. The impact of this border on individual lives is the focus of Wen-Chin Chang’s new book, Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands: Untold Stories of Overland Chinese Migrants during the Cold War.
In 1998, Ma Baoli, a closeted gay police officer living in Hebei, China, stumbled on the online novel Beijing Story while visiting an alleyway internet café. Deeply moved by its tale of gay romance, Ma’s life was changed forever, not just by the discovery of media made for gay men, but by the internet as a platform for media consumption and connection. Two decades later, Ma would be CEO of Blued, the “largest gay social networking app in the world.” But it wouldn’t last.
Cross-border Intimacies is a powerful account of the experiences of migrant women and their families between China and Taiwan. Since the early 1990s, economic exchanges between the two countries have paved the way to migration and sociocultural interaction across a previously closed border.
Edmund Burke remarked in 1790 that “… which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation… The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.” The course of the French Revolution soon proved him right. Two Paths to Prosperity reaffirms Burke’s insight on an even grander stage. Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini and Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr bring contemporary social science to bear on the key junctures in European and Chinese history. Along the way, they explore the most fundamental causes of growth, freedom, and innovation that led to the Industrial Revolution and still matter today.
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