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.
China
A midnight phone call can mean one of three things: a wrong number, a robocall or a terrible emergency. When suburban Bostonian, Claire Litvak receives a phone call from someone at the American consulate in Shanghai, it’s of the third variety: her daughter Lindsey is in the hospital on life support after she was hit by a drunk driver.
In its 1911 inaugural issue, the Women’s Eastern Times (Funü shibao) printed a composite photograph of embroiderer Shen Shou (1874–1921) together with her work—an embroidered portrait of the Italian queen Elena of Montenegro (1871–1952). A caption slip pasted onto the embroidery states: “Commendation from the Empress Dowager to bestow [upon her] the character ‘Shou’ [longevity] by imperial decree / [This is an] embroidery work by Yu-Shen Shou, the imperially appointed principal instructor of the Embroidery Program for Women at the Ministry of agriculture, Industry and Commerce”.
Podcast with Lizhi Liu, author of “From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China”
Alibaba. Tencent. JD. Pinduoduo. Run down the list of China’s most valuable companies and you’ll find, for the most part, that they’re all e-commerce companies—or at least facilitate e-commerce. The sector created giants: Alibaba grew from just 5.5 billion renminbi of revenue in 2010 to 280 billion last year.
The increasing number of memoirs and novels set in China over the past couple of decades fall into two broad buckets. A handful of Americans taught English in China and returned to write memoirs around the same time as Chinese immigrants to the US and UK began to find success as fiction writers, both in English and in translation. Daniel Tam-Claiborne’s debut novel, Transplants, combines these two viewpoints: a Chinese-American woman named Liz moves to a small town in Shanxi province to teach English and befriends a local university student named Lin.
Macau, to its understandable chagrin, often seems an afterthought: to Hong Kong which overtook it, to Canton when it came to China trade, to Manila and the eponymous galleons when it came to being an entrepôt of global status, in the history of Western colonialism and imperialism in East Asia generally and today when it comes to business and tourism. But perhaps Macau owes its continuing uniqueness to just this. It always was, and remains, a distinct anomaly.
Shanghai in the year 2000 was a cauldron of opportunity and danger. Navigating their way through this chaotic, booming city are two young English expats: Johnny Trent, a small-time entrepreneur from the wrong side of the tracks, and upper-class Felix Fawcett-Smith. An unlikely friendship begins—and is sorely tested—as Felix becomes entangled in shady business dealings and government corruption. Johnny tries to save Felix, as well as a young woman for whom they share an interest.
A forgery can be a laborious undertaking, requiring resources, labor, and knowledge. A literary forgery or hoax is categorically different from thoughtlessly plagiarized text. Indeed, if a plagiarized work steals the words and ideas of others, a forged work studiously invents words and ideas while misattributing authorship. Both plagiarism and forgery are deceptive, but forgery creates even as it deceives. It is generative. In The Forger’s Creed: Reinventing Art History in Early Modern China, JP Park shows how a 17th-century painting catalogue recording details of a non-existent collection generated further forgeries and misattributions and bolstered apocryphal art historical lineages. The history of Chinese art, Park argues, was never the same.
In 1968, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, asserting his control of China 15 years later, Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and opening up period, putting China on the path to becoming an economic powerhouse. But what happens in between these two critical periods of Chinese history? How does China go from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Deng’s embrace of reforms?
Yu Hua, one of China’s most-acclaimed contemporary novelists, leapt to prominence, in English as well as Chinese, some three decades ago with his novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, both of which were made into well-received films. Both novels, about ordinary people struggling with extraordinary hardships, were notable for their matter-of-fact, slice-of-life rendering of their characters’ tribulations. Although his next novel, Brothers, a decade or so later, made more explicit use of farce and satire, in City of Fiction, Yu Hua seems to have returned to his roots.
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