This June, I took the gaotie high speed train from Shanghai to Hong Kong (a wonderful 8-hour ride through wet and verdant semi-urbanised countryside) to join a big bunch of amazing academics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and talk about Chinese and comparative literature.

Together with Nicoletta Pesaro from Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice and Robin Visser from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I’d organised a small but very interesting panel on PLANTS – showing that authors across genres –from Guo Xuebo’s Mongolian ecoliterature to A Que’s zombie sci-fi to Can Xue’s experimental novels– employ plant characters to criticise anthropocentrism and explore more sustainable paths for humanity in the future.

Organised by current ACCL president Mingwei Song, Communication Officer Jizhou Jannis Chen (awesome combo) and their team, the conference was huge, glorious and very well organised: You can read the full programme here.

The only disappointment was the gender-imbalance: of the 6 keynotes and 2 distinguished authors, only 1 was not a man. I realise that all sorts of considerations and practicalities are at stake when organising such a vast event, but I still encourage future organisers (all of us really) to invite and secure more non-binary, women, and trans scholars as keynote speakers early on in the planning process.

Luckily, I had the chance to meet with one of my favourite authors (very distinguished), Dorothy Tse 謝曉虹, the day after the conference.

Tse (who is also associate professor of creative writing at Hong Kong Baptist University) has published many brilliant collections of short stories over the years many of which have been translated into English. I wrote about her joint volume with Hon Lai-chu 韓麗珠 A Dictionary of Two Cities 雙城辭典 in my book Sensing the Sinophone and am currently translating her first full-length novel 鷹頭貓與音樂箱女孩 (Eaglehead cat and the girl in the music box) into Danish (for Korridor small press). The novel was beautifully translated into English as Owlish by Natascha Bruce last year and was extremely well-received for good reason.

A huge thanks to S.C. Van Fonden for funding my trip.