Chinese, Sinophone and Comparative Literature: narrative spacetime, botanical monsters, literary sensory studies, urban memory, plant-human hybrids, ecocriticism across genres & a hovercraft full of eels
I am so thrilled to be in the inaugural issue of the awesome new open access journal Plant Perspectives, edited by John C. Ryan and his amazing team. It’s beautiful! And full of a variety of ways to think, write, and do research with plants.
In my article, I use the framework of companion planting, to read together three short stories in three languages – Sofie Isager Ahl’s ‘Naboplanter’ (‘Companion Plants’, 2018), Can Xue’s ‘鸡仔的心愿’ (‘Chick’s Heart’s Desire’, 2020) and Audrey R. Hollis’ ‘Seedlings’ (2018) – that translate between the botanical and the human realms and use vegetal voices to challenge gendered social conventions, linguistic preconceptions and lingering anthropo-centrism.
By reading with plants and humans as literary companions, a trans-versal perspective arises from human narrators that are either trained, inspired, or even transformed by, plant protagonists. Anthropocentrism is not eliminated but recast in a context where it represents just one perspective among many, translated into one human language among many. Read together, these three stories serve to remind us of the linguistic and corporeal situatedness of their human authors and readers, as well as the plants that trained and inspired them. But they also emphasise that their very position is the product of continued co-evolution and cross-species communication.
→Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg og Peter Damgård i samtale om bogen.
→Sidse Laugesen og Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild i samtale om Eileen Changs Shanghairomancer
→Fremførelse af Jeg bor på et bjerg af Tangdigteren Hanshan ved Susanne Jorn, Helen Davies på harpe og Poul Høxbro på xun
→Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg i samtale om det erotiske univers i Jin Ping Mei
→Bo Ærenlund og Astrid Møller-Olsen i samtale om nutidig kinesisk litteratur med fokus på science fiction og queer
→Screening af kortfilmen Altid/Aldrig Noget Andet om kinesisk poesi og oversættelse af Sebastian Cordes og Jenny Rossander (Lydmor)
→Pop-up udstilling af Tofu Collective
→Rap på kinesisk ved CXCX Chu Chu
Samtale og moderation ved Tore Leifer, oplæsning fra værkerne ved skuespiller Ellen Hillingsø. Efter arrangementet er der mulighed for at nyde en kinesisk inspireret buffet. Deltagelse i festival og buffet er gratis, men kræver tilmelding:
I’ll be looking at prominent plant characters in novels and short stories from a variety of genres including speculative fiction, eco realism, surrealism, science fiction, and literary fiction. And I’ll be creating a theoretical framework around 3 nodes: critical plant studies, posthuman feminism, and translation studies. Yeah, I’m excited. Here is a short extract from the project plan:
Plant People: Posthuman Ecologies in Contemporary Fiction
Can being more plant-like help us live more sustainably? In recent years, it has become abundantly clear that humans desperately need to rethink themselves not as masters of the universe but as co-inhabitants and carers for planet Earth.
Literature is the perfect trial ground for such radical thought experiments. In my research, I combine a more-than-human perspective on planetary ecologies with a postcolonial approach to world literature to explore how thinking and writing with plants can help us move beyond the Anthropocene.
In the study of literature, plants have traditionally been categorised as poetic metaphors or ambient backdrops for narrative action. Although such passive perspectives may have been adequate in the past, the ongoing environmental crisis demands a more nuanced and theoretically informed approach.
Building on previous aesthetic and ecocritical research on “nature” as a general category often used to criticise human hubris (Chen; Thornber), my project goes one step further than human-nature antagonism and looks at entangled plant-people perspectives on our planet.
By analysing fiction in Chinese –second only to English as a world language– from around the globe, this project aids the much-needed democratisation of world literature (Apter; Nuttall) and highlights environmental humanities as an essential discipline for understanding 21st century planetary realities.
Ref
Apter, Emily. 2019. ‘Untranslatability and the geopolitics of reading’. PMLA 134 (1): 194-200. Chen, Wangheng. 2007. Huanjing meixue 环境美学 [Environmental Aesthetics]. Wuhan: Wuhan University Press. Nuttall, Sarah. 2021. “World Literature as Planetary Literature.” In D. Ganguly (ed.), The Cambridge History of World Literature, pp. 924-941. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Thornber, Karen. 2012. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Translation is currently being discussed across academic disciplines and recognised as an essential process, performance, and metaphor for 21st-century realities as we engage with people and products from across the globe on a daily basis. My morning coffee has been through several translations: from the literal translation of information on the packaging to the cultural translation of a 15th-century Sufi aid to concentration into an integral part of waking workday rituals across the planet. Finally, it involves a metaphoric translation of substance into sensation, of hot black liquid into a sense of wellbeing and alertness. But such processes are not necessarily benign, and in the moment of coffee-fuelled bliss, the modern slavery taking place on many non-Fairtrade plantations gets lost in translation.
Translation is rarely a simple equal exchange but mostly constitutes, as Yunte Huang and Hangping Xu rightly point out in their introduction to the latest issue of Prism, “a multidirectional and intertextual hermeneutic process” (3). This special issue on Translatability and Transmediality: Chinese Poetry in/and the World “troubles the power asymmetry between national and world literatures, or between the Wets and the Rest [by investigating] how Chinese poetry interacts with the world via the criss-crossing routes of translation, dissemination, diaspora, mediation, transmission, reception, reincarnation, return, and so on” (2). It aims to investigate poetic translation from the perspective of a “a polycentric world” (4) and presents a bouquet of 12 diverse chapters on the subject. As such, it forms a rich source of inspiration for both translation scholars, poetry scholars, and all researchers interested in experimental modes of literary comparison. I opened the volume to feed my increasing interest in literary translation and came out more curious than ever and with a new craving for poetry.
I really enjoyed Shengwing Wu’s piece on how modernist poets used classical poetic motifs like wang 望 (looking into the distance) to describe modern technology like the Eiffel Tower or gazing at the moon through a telescope: “playing skilfully with the literal and figurative meanings or words (Buddhist or other culturally loaded terms) and engaging in extensive corporation with tradition and imaginative mediation, these poets also translated their sensory perceptions and emotions, in somewhat different manners, into the classical-style forms” (37). Translating extremely contemporary hi-tech inventions into the language of a poetic past creates a delightful twist that shows just how much translation (between languages, periods, or cultures) adds to a text. Cosima Bruno and Lianjun Yan in their essay likewise highlight poems inspired by poems, and propose to view such instances not as two units in an intertextual comparison, but as entangled poetry with translation as “a medium, an origin, and an afterlife” (171).
While surprising new context can have an artistic effect, Haun Saussy, in his analysis, shows how the extreme decontextualisation of anthologies misrepresents and risks mistranslating poetry. Examples he gives include a series of poems by Wang Wei that were originally published as a poetic conversation with Pei Di and which have since entered world literature as what he calls “pure poems”. Saussy argues that rather than freeing the individual poem, such radical decontextualisation risks freezing it into a synecdoche for an entire nation’s poetry. He concludes that “[c]areful attention to poems and paintings—outside the constricting frames of anthologisation and museum display—reveals their internal multiplicity and provides one form of resistance to the binding force of nationally ordained cosmologies” (22).
In her elegant expose of the immense Russian influence on modern Chinese poetry, Michelle Yeh shows just how little sense such bordered in versions of national poetry make, while Hangping Xu experiments with the notion of “translation as an interpretive performance, positing a translator’s relationship to the source text as akin to an actor’s relationship to their script” (228), proposing that the translator incorporate not only content but also context into their performance.
Through the new contexts and new performances that translation introduces, whole new genres of poetry may arise. Xiaorong Li demonstrates how poems translated by New Style sensual-sentimental xiangyan 香艷 poets “not only attempted to seek a common ground among different cultural expressions but also allowed themselves to be inspired by the source texts and create something hitherto unseen in the target language and culture” (72) such as using wen 吻 as a term for romantic kissing. Nick Admussen suggests that such processes of enrichment and innovation might be beneficial in academia as well as poetry. He explores a current rise of scholar-poets in US universities and argues that the interdisciplinary translation of scholarship into poetry might help admit and acknowledge the personal in the academic—the individual circumstances and accidents that affects what and how we study.
Several of the essays in the special issue deal with the politics of translation, such as Maghiel van Crevel, who analyses contemporary battler poetry (打工诗歌) “written on the flip-side of the MADE IN CHINA label” (203). He criticises the fact that “it is especially in translation that a single author can come to operate as a synecdoche for an entire literary genre” (206) and proposes the term hypertranslatable for a text that “elicits especially high numbers of translations, whose perspectives on the source text and its reproduction may converge but may also differ widely and indeed irreconcilably” (209). Adding a historical dimension to the discussion of the politics of cultural exchange, Chris Song examines the case of Dong Xun and Thomas Francis Wade’s collaborative translation of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life” as an instance of diplomacy through poetry with translation as a prime mechanism of early soft power exchanges. Coinciding with Wade’s appointment as chargé d’affaires, the “poetry translation at the time was part of the means to incorporate social activities and cultural exchanges into his diplomatic practice that aimed to exert ‘pressure of inconvenience without hostility’” (80).
Lucas Klein sees translation as an extension of the poem and proposes that the poetics of translation is always political. Inspired by his works on poems from the Angel Island detention center, he writes that “rather than thinking in terms of foreignisation and nativisation, I ask if some translations assimilate their source texts, while other lock their source texts in detention” (101). If a translation locks its poem in detention by being too focused on the politics of content and context, “assimilated translation demands too little room for itself, challenges too little” (101). Klein proposes that multiple translations and translations that pay attention to the political in the aesthetic may be just as relevant and even more powerful.
Rather than an extension of something that is already there, Jacob Edmond seeks to invert our view of translation and invites readers to reimagine their internal literary world maps so that the intercultural, intertextual seas take centre stage and national literatures recede to appear as accidental nodules in a vast ocean of translation. As he posits, translation is “not as something that happens to national literatures but as what constitutes them” (139). Inspired by Bei Dao’s understanding of creative writing as a form of translation whereby a writer translates their thoughts, sensations, and experiences into words, he purports that “translation is not just something that happens to the already fully formed literary work but is frequently interwoven into the fabric of its making” (154).
Read together, this volume is a multifaceted and polyvocal intervention in the current discussion of how thinking in and through translation can help scholars/poets/humans rethink and challenge uneven power relations and understand the complexities and entanglements of contemporary literature in ways that go beyond national canons or elitist world literature anthologies to embrace the creative mess of literary entanglement across space, time, and languages. I wholeheartedly agree with Edmond when he echoes Epeli Hau’ofa and asks: “[i]nstead of seeing isolated islands of national languages and literatures, what if we opened our eyes and ears to the noisy ocean of translation out of which those islands emerge?”
Ta-wei told me about experiences with nosy masseurs that inspired him to write about the skin as a medium for spying on people’s private lives. It makes sense – in classical Chinese medicine, the skin has always been a primary source of information about the health of the body through sphygmology (pulse examination). The skin is a membrane that reveals as much as it conceals.
Another important membrane in the novel is the sea: Due to heavy pollution and a damaged ozone layer letting in UV-rays, humanity has relocated to the sea floor. Here, Ta-wei criticized his younger self for falling into the trap of portraying settler colonialism uncritically – a widespread phenomenon in SF. Today he would have paid much more attention to the lifeforms already inhabiting the sea and questioned what mass human migration would have meant for the indigenous ecology.
Screens are also a type of membrane that the novel explores, a motif that has only become more relevant since the advent of smart phones and more recently remote meetings and video chats during the pandemic.
On a metaphorical level, the novel continuously plays with, and softens, membranes between categories – particularly those pertaining to gender and species. Momo is born in a male body, raised as a girl, and later undergoes medical transition to become female. Such social and physical categories are backgrounded however, as Momos mothers have always raised her as their daughter – albeit a special fairytale daughter, born from a peach.
Momo is also partly artificial. She has one finger replaced with a biological replica and that starts a philosophical inquiry into what it means to be human. In Momo’s society, androids – a type of biological robot – do all the hard and dangerous work. How much of Momo would need to be replaced by bionics before she is more android than human? As we incorporate technology more intimately into our bodies and everyday lives – pacemakers, cochlear implants, glasses and smarts phones – many of us are habitual cyborgs.
Finally, the membrane of language was an interesting topic for me as a translator. The way the novel lives in various languages and the fact that, in each linguistic bubble, Momo and her subsea world looks and sounds slightly different. “Membrane” is not pronounced mo in Danish as it is in Chinese, and so the immediate auditory connection between Momo and the membranes is obscured. On the other hand, mother in Danish (mor) is pronounced exactly like membrane in Chinese –mo – and so another connection is established. As translation takes us through the linguistic membrane of one language and into another, the novel also transitions and changes, becoming something new that is both the same and different.
Translating Chi Ta-wei’s 膜 (The Membranes, Membraner) – an amazing deep sea exploration of the human mind-body – has been a tremendously enjoyable ride with nothing but kindness and support from both Ta-wei and the publishers Korridor (as well as generous funding from Books from Taiwan and the S. C. Van foundation). The amazing cover art and bookmark are by Ida Marie Therkildsen.
This outwardly simple novel elegantly chronicles the story of skin care specialist Momo and her intimate yet alienated relationship with her subsea surroundings. But below the surface, so many of the narrative’s deceptively innocent scenes lead to convoluted and uncomfortably relevant questions about how we perceive, interact with, and take care of our world.
A work of speculative fiction, Chi’s work takes nothing for granted. The novel addresses several personal and societal issues that are easily as relevant today as they were 25 years ago when it was first published in 1996: Here queer identities and non-heterosexual relationships are the norm, humans rely on biochemically constructed androids to survive the environmental disasters they have caused, and giant publishing houses are among the most powerful players under the sea.
At the same time, Chi Ta-wei has created an intimate and sensual reading experience that I have done my best to rewrite with Danish words. A major challenge for me was the way repetition of a single term and its near synonyms works well in Chinese but appear clumsy and annoying in the more limited vocabulary of Danish. So, rather than constantIy repeating phrases like “under havet (under the sea)” and “oppe på land (up on dry land),” I ended up developing the fictional place names Underhavet (The Subsea) and Landjorden (Dryland) for the new futurist world Momo inhabits. Creating and curating a terminology that conveys the stark contrast between the liveable underwater atmosphere and the barren landmasses above was one of the absolute perks of translating Membraner.
Landscapes Beyond: Crossing Boundaries in Sinophone SF
This panel examines at how contemporary science fiction stories construct landscapes beyond the real and in doing so cross a variety of boundaries within and beyond the text.
Born out of the creative translation of English and Japanese stories at the turn of the 20th century, Chinese SF has from its inception been a genre between -sometimes published as science writing and sometimes as literary fiction.[1] SF stories have historically been and continue to be, adapted from one medium to another – from novels to lianhuanhua and from online short stories to TV dramas[2] – and the stories themselves habitually explore the boundaries of human perception and knowledge. In short, Chinese SF stories inhabit the spaces between and across categories in terms of content and form, language, and story.
Bringing together a handful of Nordic scholars devoted to studying speculative fiction, this panel approaches boundary-crossing in SF from a variety of different positions including generic hybridity, translation, posthuman perception, and transmediality. By looking at texts that cross from one genre or medium to another, are translated from one language to another, or whose perspective shift from human to machine, this panel exhibit contemporary SF’s ability to challenge and expand our understanding of the landscapes of real on every level.
From thousand-mile lenses to super VR invincible infrared X-ray glasses: A century of machine vision in Chinese science fiction
Technologies of vision – particularly optical augmentations of the human eye and automated sensing machines – are one of the most common ways in which the future of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is represented in Chinese science fiction. For example, in the 2017 animation movie Have a Nice Day by Chinese director Liu Jian, for instance, a suburban scoundrel named Yellow Eye roams around the city wearing his “super VR invincible infrared X-ray glasses”, a pair of DIY spectacles that allow him to peer inside other people’s belongings as well as under women’s clothes. After a series of misfortunes, Yellow Eye’s pursuit of a bag full of banknotes leads him to his demise: ironically, he gets electrocuted while smashing a traffic surveillance camera for fear of having been caught in its augmented field of view. While the centrality of machine vision in sci-fi is not unique to China, it clearly resonates with historical experiences of surveillance and a long genealogy of speculation about the national development of optical technologies. Drawing on a wide sample of Chinese science-fictional narratives from different historical moments, this presentation analyzes the shifting metaphors through which the future of optical technologies and automated vision has been imagined by Chinese sci-fi authors over a century of cultural production.
Gabriele de Seta
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen
“For Every Lonely Childhood, There is a Doraemon”: Alienation, Generic Hybridity and the Vindication of Optimism in A Que’s “Farewell, Doraemon”
In the face of seemingly insurmountable personal difficulties and systemic injustices, is it still possible to believe in a better future? In the 2016 science fiction novella “Farewell, Doraemon” (再见哆啦A梦) by A Que (阿缺, b. 1990), this question is examined through the story of an alienated young man grappling with the harsh social realities of rural China, which are exemplified by the tragic life of his childhood friend and contrasted with the cheerful world of the animation series Doraemon. While the adventures of the series’ time-traveling robot at first seem far removed from the protagonist and his friend’s own circumstances, as the story unfolds the protagonist eventually assumes the mantle of Doraemon and takes action to help change their fates.
Drawing from Cara Healey’s conception of “generic hybridity” between Western SF and Chinese critical realism as a key characteristic of contemporary Chinese science fiction, I will examine how “Farewell, Doraemon” uses the critical realist tropes of the educated narrator returning to his hometown and the long-suffering female character to highlight contemporary social issues in rural China. Moreover, I will illustrate how the novella diverges from realist conventions by including a time travel element, allowing the story to explore the possibility of alternative endings to established narratives. I will also argue that in doing so, “Farewell, Doraemon” challenges fatalistic attitudes towards the suffering of marginalized people and foregrounds the importance of imagination and kindness in creating positive change in our communities.
Eero Antero Suoranta Doctoral Candidate, Doctoral Programme in Philosophy, Arts, and Society, University of Helsinki
Chuanyue – Time Travel Tropes: From Chinese Web Literature to Tv or Web Adaptations
This study seeks to investigate themes of historical romance, gender expression, and social mobility in tv and web-serial adaptations of three time-travel (chuanyue 穿越) web novels: Bubu Jingxin 步步惊心 by Tong Hua (2005), The Promotion Record of a Crown Princess 太子妃升职记 by Xian Cheng (2010), and Qing Yu Nian 庆余年 by Mao Ni (2007). Each theme correlates with the main characters’ experiences of certain lacks and failures of modern Chinese society as the protagonists travel back in time to pursue possibilities for seeking romance with multiple choices of partners, for challenging societal gender roles and, lastly, for achieving vertical social mobility by being reborn into a powerful family or gaining special abilities and advancing in an alternative society.
Translating motifs of time-travel from web novels to either tv-series or web-series (where one is aired on television while the other is aired online), requires some level of rewriting to pass censorship (guoshen 过审), especially after the 2012 restriction ban on subgenres such as palace dramas and time-travel dramas. The adaptations chosen for this study, produced before and after the 2012 restriction ban, are interesting examples of how time-travel translates from one medium to another, how adaptation can expand the story world and, in particular, how these expansions and limitations affects and enhance themes of historical romance, gender expression, and social mobility.
Ying Chen
Teaching Assistant / MA stud., Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Productive Ambivalences as World-building in the Work of Liu Cixin
Literary works of science fiction often revolve around investigating the estranging effects of radical technological developments upon individuals and societies; that at least is Suvin’s seminal claim which has produced much enlightening scholarship. This paper takes a related yet still markedly different route by examining the ways in which the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s world-building occurs through the working out of a limited number of productive ambivalences: These include the injunction to remember against the desire to forget; the delights of ocular examination against the paralyzing effects of surveillance; and the longing for sincerity against the fear of betrayal. The paper claims that Liu Cixin’s famous Three-Body trilogy can be considered a world created by transposing these social anxieties, characteristic of contemporary China, onto both plot elements and specific imaginary technologies present in the work. This close reading enables us to gain a clearer grasp of the “generative motor” in Liu Cixin’s works. This reading also illuminates some of the genuine literary strengths of Liu Cixin’s oeuvre, which have so far been underappreciated due to Liu’s somewhat stereotypical representation of (particularly female) characters and his manifest disinterest in serving up ethical or narrative dilemmas for the readers to grapple with.
Bo Ærenlund Sørensen
Tenure Track Adjunkt, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Soft Translation: Fluidities of Gender, Language, and Sea in Chi Ta-wei
The emergence of Chinese language SF in the early twentieth century was closely intertwined with translation to the extent that “[w]orks labelled kehuan xiaoshuo [SF] initially included translations and creative adaptations of English works, often based on Japanese translations[.]”[3] In this paper I am inspired by this entanglement of literary creation and translation, epitomised by Lu Xun’s processual approach of “hard translation” (硬译).[4]
Taking my own translation of Taiwanese author Chi Ta-wei’s 紀大偉 sub-sea SF-novel The Membranes (膜)[5] into Danish as my case study, I pursue a strategy of “soft translation” where Lu Xun’s “brutal penetration into the unfamiliar” and forceful “chewing” over of the text[6] is replaced by linguistic exchanges seeping through the porous membrane of the text as it enters and is entered by the translator and tasted by the supple tongues of multiple languages. Inspired by Chi’s novel, I use the image of the membrane to look at the fluidity of boundaries between genders, bodies, and languages that the translation of this underwater tale entails. Finally, I borrow feminist scholar Astrida Neimanis’ posthumanist conceptualisation of a planetary “hydrocommons of wet relations”[7] to situate my own translation within a planetary commons of translated literary relations.
Astrid Møller-Olsen
International Research Fellow, Lund/Stavanger/Oxford Universities
[1] Isaacson, Nathaniel (2017): Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press: 8.
[2] Li, Hua (2021): “7 Fledgling Media Convergence: PRC SF from Print to Electronic Media.” Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. University of Toronto Press: 134-164.
[3] Isaacson, Nathaniel (2017): Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press: 8.
[4] Wang, Pu (2013): “The Promethean translator and cannibalistic pains: Lu Xun’s ‘hard translation’ as a political allegory.” Translation Studies, 6:3, 324-338.
[5] Chi, Ta-wei 紀大偉 (2011/1995): Mo 膜 [Membranes]. Taipei: Linking Publishing. Translated into English as The Membranes: A Novel by Ari Larissa Heinrich for Columbia University Press, 2021.
As part of Margaret’s lecture series ‘Visual Culture in Modern and Contemporary China‘ I listened to Jane Qian Liu talk about how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, creatively translated love stories blurred the boundaries between reader, writer and protagonist when people not only read but rewrote and even lived out the new romantic narratives.
I was absolutely fascinated by Coraline Jortay’s presentation of her ongoing research into Republican-era debates on gendered pronouns moving from 他 and 伊 over attempts at modernisation through the Japanese 彼女 or the latinized ta and taa to the 她 we know today and further into contemporary gender-neutral pronouns like X也 and ta們.
I also got toshare my own ongoing research on how contemporary Sinophone works of fiction use botanical characters, plant imagery and green environments to create alternative realities, explore possible futures and deal with traumatic pasts – inclduing how plants figure as partly human monsters, planetary partners, or ecological avengers in works by Chi Hui 迟卉, Yan Ge 颜歌, Dorothy Tse’s 謝曉虹, Alai 阿来, Chu T’ien-hsin 朱天心, and Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章.
Finally, I got to explore the glorious, if somewhat muddy, Oxford countryside – here are a biased outsider’s best tips:
NATURE TIP: Ramble! Walk north along the Thames past Port Meadow and on to the Trout Inn or south past Christ Church Meadow to the Isis Farmhouse pub. For a longer walk, try the Oxford Jubilee Circular Walk up Boar Hill to the view that inspired Matthew Arnold to write about Oxford’s “dreaming spires.”
TIPPLE TIP: Try a pint of real/cask ale – it is allowed to continue fermentation in the cask at the pub and the result is a much more complex and mellow taste than the sharp fizz of ordinary tap beer.
BOOK TIP: If you are a student or faculty at a university in or outside the UK, you can apply for a Bodleian reader card and use all the fabulous libraries. There are also some tempting second hand bookshops like Last Bookshop Jericho, Book Stop by St. Mary Magdalen and Oxfam on St Giles.
In Of Forests and Humans, Monika Gaenssbauer and Nicholas Olczak present anglophone readers with the narrative experimentation, complex urbanism and literary variety of contemporary fiction from Hong Kong. The volume contains six well-chosen short stories published between 1992 and 2011 and introduces a variety of different literary styles, from Xi Xi’s 西西 surreal fabulations in “Elzéard Bouffier’s Forest” to Chan Lai Kuen’s 陳麗娟 science-fiction-flavoured urban labyrinths in “E6880**(2) from Block 6, building 20, wing E”.
Each short story is followed by a close reading by the editor-translators, which provides cultural and historical context, suggestions for relevant theoretical approaches, as well as their reading of the piece. This is meant as a pathway into the text rather than a definitive interpretation, for, as the editors rightly acknowledge, the “strength of many of the stories in this collection [is] that they might draw very different responses and interpretations from different kinds of readers”. For instance, where Gaenssbauer and Olczak were reminded of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s short story “The Tunnel” when reading Wang Pu’s 王璞 “Greek Sandals”, an image from “The Tunnel” in Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams instantly surfaced in my mind when I read the story. It is interesting that the symbolic structure of the tunnel often used to represent the link between conscious wakefulness and subconscious longings and emotions so readily solicits personal and immediate responses in different readers. If Hong Kong literature has a common denominator despite its plurality of forms and voices, it is the willingness to embrace and invite, at times even demand, multiple, contrasting and complicated readings.
As the editors note, Xi Xi’s story is intertextual in setting, writing itself into and through Jean Giono’s “The Man Who Planted Trees”. It is a story of the cyclical withering and rebirth of a utopian forest, half-hearsay, half-imaginary, and slowly being translated, it forms the memory of the second-person protagonist’s father through the protagonist’s sensory experiences and onto the pages of the story. This situates the story firmly on the boundary between memory and fiction, and reality and imagination, allowing us to read it as a metafictional comment on how such processes become intertwined in literary narratives. The story also has an ecocritical aftertaste when, in the space of a single page, the utopian forest of the father’s recollections comes to life only to dry up again: “Elzéard Bouffier’s forest unfolded like a flower, this green sea of trees changed the area into a paradise where people lived peacefully […] The dried out well also came to life again […]” and a few lines further down, “the last drops of water had dried up, the river turned into a clay-grey canal. You did not know what had happened in the meantime to turn the gardens into a wasteland and make Elzéard Bouffier’s forest completely disappear.” Several utopian intertexts spring to mind, including Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 famous fable “Peach Blossom Spring”, which depicts a hidden site where human society has been preserved in its natural and unspoiled state. At the same time, it is also metatextual, describing how the reading experience brings to life the forest of memory that has all but disappeared with time. In the end, when the protagonist arrives at the barren memory of a long-gone forest and finds the last of Bouffier’s acorns, the cycle is ready to start over as the seeds sprout a new story, a new life.
Several of the stories experiment with the popular genre of urban romance, but they do so in completely unexpected ways by delving into darker aspects of city life. This includes depictions of deadly violence in Jessie Chu’s 朱艷紅 “Wonderland”, a story that flirts with the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction without giving in to any of the clichés. Instead, it uses the crime fiction format to explore contrasting yet intermingled experiences of alienation and proximity in a global big city.
“Water pipes on the side of a building on the Ap Lei Chau Estate” by Anne Roberts
Hon Lai-chu’s 韓麗珠 “Water Pipe Forest” is sublime in its depiction of the city-body, using as it does the image of plumbing to form a corporeal link between human interior and urban exterior. At the same time as the building across from the narrator-protagonist’s home is demolished due to faulty plumbing and bursting pipes, her grandmother is admitted to hospital with a gastric ailment establishing a symbolic parallel. On a more explicit note, the narrator identifies directly with her building through the similarity between water pipes and gastric tubes: “On the fourth day without water I still heard no noise in the water pipe. I felt restless, as if part of my body was missing.” Playing with sensory perceptions of watery noises gurgling through buildings and bodies, the story replicates and reverses the relationship between citizen and city in the relationship between reader and text. Just as the sound of water in the pipes recalls and affirms the protagonist own body, so does the watery symphony of the text resound in the body of the reader.
Of Forests and Humans promises to be a great resource for students of literature, Chinese studies, and/or translation studies, yet I can’t help wishing that the editors had opted for a bilingual text. This would have allowed curious anglophone readers to acquaint themselves with traditional characters while enjoying high-quality literature and to explore the paths chosen by the translators as a practical exercise in translation. Despite this omission, the fact that the original title and source of each story is given at the end of each translation is a terrific help that will permit readers to pursue analyses of the original texts or follow up on other works by the authors showcased in this collection. The bibliography at the end of the volume likewise provides a good starting point for readers who want to engage theoretically and historically with Hong Kong literature.
Read together, these stories are examples of innovative approaches to genres such as urban romance, science fiction, crime fiction and showcase the diversity and originality of Hong Kong literature. The editors have wisely included highly celebrated as well as lesser-known authors, ensuring there is something for both veterans and newcomers to explore. Some of the translations feel a little stiff while others offer a smoother read and in a few instances something appears to have gone wrong in the typesetting, baffling the reader with recurring light-grey bits of text.
The title Of Forests and Humans, as well as providing a thematic focus on the jungle-like qualities of urban life, creates an anticipation of narrative engagements with the spatial that are both organic and unconventional, an expectation the stories each fulfil in their individual way. Here, skyscrapers rise like huge tree trunks above the humans navigating the dynamic and metamorphous cityscape. People look at one another’s faces and see overlapping images of intimate strangers and alienated kinfolk. Readers get lost in unfamiliar storylines, only to glimpse their own memories at every fictional street corner. There is certainly enough to discover and celebrate in contemporary Hong Kong literature and now a little more of it is available in English.
How to cite: Møller-Olsen, Astrid. “Stories Grow in Hong Kong: A Review of Of Forests and Humans.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 01 Sept. 2022, chajournal.blog/2022/09/01/forests-and-humans/
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