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
→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.
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.
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 this episode of the Sinophone Unrealities podcast, we discuss three types of resistance found in post-80s Chinese SF: resistance to social inequalities, to political repression/censorship, and to gender stereotypes. Frederike gives examples from her research into works by Hao Jingfang, Ma Boyong, Zhang Ran, Chi Hui, Gu Shi, and Chen Qiufan and comments on the innovations and limitations of science fictional narratives when it comes to engaging with the sociopolitical issues of contemporary society.
Rebellious guest: Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker (she/her) is an assistant professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University. She received her PhD in Chinese Studies from the Free University of Berlin in June 2021 with a thesis on socio-political discourses in contemporary Chinese science fiction literature. She has participated in numerous international conferences and co-hosted events and talks with Chinese SF writers in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg. Apart from Chinese science fiction, she is also interested in Chinese queer culture. When not sitting in front of her computer or behind her books, she explores nature by hiking or horse riding.
Agitated host agitator: Astrid Møller-Olsen is international research fellow with the Universities of Lund, Stavanger, and Oxford, funded by the Swedish Research Council. She has published on fictional dictionaries, oneiric soundscapes, digital chronotopes in SF, ecocritical temporalities, and sensory urban spacetime. Her first monograph Sensing the Sinophone will be out in early 2022 by Cambria Press. Her current research is a cross-generic study of plant-human relationships in contemporary Sinophone literature from science fiction to surrealism: https://xiaoshuo.blog/
Despite spending a lot of my working hours with literary texts, my readings are not always as immersive as I would like. With the seven stories that make up the translated anthology Queer Taiwanese Literature, I couldn’t help myself. Each one sucked me into its wormhole rabbit hole and when I came out again, everything seemed subtly different.
Spanning the last 50 years, these seven short stories featuring Taiwanese queer experiences have been expertly selected by queer historian Howard Chiang and brilliantly translated. Under the banner of tongzhi literature (同志文学), they include sexual and social identities that are or have been perceived as deviant including asexuality, transgender, transsexuality, homosexuality, and other queer (non)categories.
The term tongzhi originally meant “comrade” in Sun Yat-sen’s usage and continues to do so in both Taiwanese and Mainland China formal political discourse. Wah-shan Chou traces the term back to the 3000-year-old Yijing (易經 Book of Changes) and writes that it was appropriated by activists for the first Hong Kong lesbian and gay film festival in 1989. He explains that “’homosexual’ was dropped as it was a medical term denoting sickness and pathology. Even positive categories such as ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian,’ and ‘queer’ are Anglo-Saxon constructs with specific histories that fail to capture the indigenous features of Chinese same-sex relations” (Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies 2). He highlights that the term is not only about sexual preference but also about acknowledging non-hetero forms of kinship and family. Indeed, most of the stories in this anthology are not about sexual experiences, but about love and pain, about rejection and acceptance, about forging identities and making flexible (social) space.
I love (this anthology is wonderful, I can’t help starting each paragraph like this) how menstruation blood runs a track of living, red sameness that simultaneously disgusts and draws the sexually ambivalent protagonist towards her friend Ann in Li Ang’s “Late Spring” (1975, translated by Yichun Liu).
I love how the cityscapes of San Francisco and Taipei blend in Chi Ta-wei’s meandering, Ginsberg-inspired “Howl” (1998 translated by Yahia Zhengtang Ma) — a story of the terminally ill but irrepressible man Amoeba who prefers a stranger’s reluctant hospitality to his family home as he roams the streets on his final, lonely journey. The name Amoeba is apt as it denotes a single-cell organism with no fixed body shape that reproduces asexually and can be parasitic as this one seems to the narrator to be. It also recalls Chi’s earlier novella “The Membranes” from 1995.
I love the smoke-hoarsened and casually open-minded talk of the tribal mothers in Dadelavan Ibau’s “Muakai” (2001, translated by Kyle Shernuk) and its haunting of ancient myths from the present through queer reinterpretation.
I love the time-fuck of the eternal, futuristic stone age evoked in Hsu Yu-hsuan’s “Violet” (2008, translated by Howard Chiang and Shengchi Hsu) and the protagonist’s lifestyle cocktail of illegal drugs and fitness health foods needed to survive his white-collar working life.
I love the brutal naivete of Lin Yu-hsuan’s “A Daughter” (2014, translated by Shengchi Hsu) and the image of the young boy finally transforming into the young woman he always was. Through her own body work, she provides a space for both her dad and the text to transform into something unexpectedly complicated and gorgeous as well: “The gown’s zip is stuck halfway on Dad’s back, faintly revealing her blossoming age spots through the layers of lace.”
I love the conclusion to Chen Xue‘s jumble of queer and futuristic reproduction strategies, excess of ovaries, and phantom wombs in “A Nonexistent Thing” (2020, translated by Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell) that “what is important is that you can write. Write her out.” A fitting and hopeful end to an anthology of struggle, hurt, and haunting beauty.
Above all, I love all the poetic disillusionment coupled with the uncompromising individuality and bloody-mindedness of the main characters in Tsao Li-chuan’s novella “On Her Gray Hair Etcetera” (1996, translated by Jamie Tse). Just read it.
I would have liked to see the original titles for each work displayed alongside the English translation but appreciate that the date of publication and short context of each story is available in Howard Chiang’s introduction so that one can chose to read it before, after, or not at all. The many translators, the editor, and the editorial assistant are all duly credited and introduced at the end of the book.
If you expect to have an overview of Taiwan’s tongzhi literature after reading the anthology, you are mistaken. The term may unite against heteronormativity, but it also embraces heterogeneity. What you do get is a body dive into an ocean of multitudinous voices, of individual pains and perspectives, a promise that here is something here to explore in text, body, and social world, quite possibly for the rest of your life.
Introduction by Howard Chiang
1: Late Spring by Li Ang (translated by Yichun Liu)
2: On Her Gray Hair Etcetera by Tsao Li-chuan (translated by Jamie Tse)
3: Howl by Ta-wei Chi (translated by Yahia Zhengtang Ma)
4: Muakai by Dadelavan Ibau (translated by Kyle Shernuk)
5: Violet by Hsu Yu-chen (translated by Howard Chiang and Shengchi Hsu)
6: A Daughter by Lin Yu-hsuan (translated by Shengchi Hsu)
7: A Nonexistent Thing by Chen Xue (translated by Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell)
Discussions and collective ramblings touched upon the difference between dolls and robots as literary figures, the gendered temporalities of futurism, the fruitful (vegetal) convergences between feminism and posthumanism, and whether the doll house of gendered expectations still persists even “after Nora leaves home.”
Background
In recent years, Chinese and Sinophone science fiction has gained new popularity, not only among devoted readers, but within the scholarly community as well. As part of the emerging field of ‘global science fiction studies,’ such research contributes to a diversification of literary scholarship by including hitherto neglected cultural and linguistic areas. This panel grows out of these postcolonial endeavours and adds a gender dimension to the ongoing academic discussion of how works of speculative and science fiction envision global futures and challenge present ideas.
By analysing and comparing narrative negotiations of what it means to be a woman, a plant, or something in-between, the presentations in this panel examine the variety and complexity of futurist visions in Chinese language fiction. Far from being concerned solely with technology and space travel, contemporary science fiction is a multifaceted genre that is equally taken up with questions of human societies and identities. By virtue of a shared focus on gender, this panel introduces the original and wildly imaginative ways in which contemporary authors contest, reinforce, or hybridise conventional concepts of gender.
From contemporary feminist reinterpretations of Lu Xun’s and Henrik Ibsen’s “doll houses” to the alienated female workers of the future in Han Song’s 2012 novel Gaotie, from Chi Hui’s feminist utopia to plant-woman hybrids and environmental criticism, this panel investigates the manifold ways in which literature crafts and questions gendered landscapes for a global future.
Lineup
Roots to the Future: Gender and Plant-human Hybrids in Contemporary Fiction. Astrid Møller-Olsen – Lund University.
Dwindling Doll’s Houses: Surreal Gendered Futures in Contemporary Fiction from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Coraline Jortay – University of Oxford.
Gender Issues in Han Song’s Novel Gaotie (The High-speed Railway). Hua Li – Montana State University.
Emancipatory Futures: Transgressing Gender Boundaries in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction. Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker – Heidelberg University.
How does writing in a foreign language help authors think beyond their own perspective and imagine other beings, other identities, other species? In this episode, Regina Kanyu Wang talks about her research into environmental SF, her own use of English to experiment with a non-human narrative voice, and about The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, a new anthology of Chinese science fiction and fantasy, written, edited, and translated by women and nonbinary creators.
Enjoying a sunny day from each our separate Norwegian coast, we also discuss the delightful gender ambiguity of literary pseudonyms, the manyfold human machine of literary publishing, and the limits of genre.
Visiting Symbiont: Regina Kanyu Wang is a PhD fellow of the CoFUTURES project at the University of Oslo. Her research interest lies in Chinese science fiction, especially from the gender and environmental perspective. She is also an awarded writer who writes both science fiction and non-fiction who has won multiple Xingyun Awards for Global Chinese SF (Chinese Nebular), SF Comet International SF Writing Competition, Annual Best Works of Shanghai Writers’ Association and others. She has co-edited the Chinese SF special issue of Vector, the critical issue of BSFA and The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, an all-women-and-non-binary anthology of Chinese speculative fiction, forthcoming in 2022.
Host Organism:Astrid Møller-Olsen is postdoctoral fellow in an international position between Lund University (Sweden), University of Stavanger (Norway), and University of Oxford (UK) funded by the Swedish Research Council. She has a background in comparative literature and Chinese studies and has published on fictional dictionaries, urban forms of narrative memory, and sensory approaches to the study of literature. Her current research is a cross-generic study of plant-human relationships in contemporary Sinophone literature from science fiction to surrealism: https://xiaoshuo.blog/
We know that everything we experience is mediated -through the senses in collaboration with the brain- it is like there is a membrane between our selves and the world. But where does the membrane stop and reality begin? Can we even be sure that there is something on the other side? Or turn it around; where does the membrane stop, and the self begin? Is there even something at the core? These are the questions raised in Chi Ta-wei’s 紀大偉 novel The Membranes(first published as <膜> in 1995), a unique work of queer speculation, critical futurism, and cyber-psychology, superbly and lucidly translated into English by Ari Larissa Heinrich.
The novel is sometimes described as dystopian, but I see nothing in it that is not already out there, albeit in different forms: Is organ and tissue harvesting from androids worse than from other humans or animals? Is stealing people’s sensory experiences via extra layers of false skin all that different from the gathering of personal information that goes on every time you press your fingers against a computer keyboard to access the internet? Is the brutal class segregation between exposed land-dwellers and protected sea-dwellers unlike the way factories and garbage dumps are habitually constructed in the poorest areas of city and planet? As all good speculative fiction does, The Membranes draws attention to our own world by recreating familiar emotions in estranging environments, providing fresh perspectives on fundamental questions, in Chi’s case, in highly poetic and inventive ways.
The Membranes narrates a short time span around the 30th birthday of Momo, the owner of a skin treatment parlor named Salon Canary located at the ocean floor in the year 2100. Through Momo’s memories and experiences, we learn of her life history and of the many membranes that surround her: “Membranes filtered Momo’s every impression of the world. At thirty, she felt there was at least one layer of membrane between her and the world. Not the kind of membrane she applied to her clients receiving facials at work, obviously. The invisible kind. The kind that made her feel like at tiny water flea – a Daphnia encased in a cell, swimming alone out to sea” (1).
Momo feels separated from her peers and, outside her work, has difficulty engaging in any kind of intimate relations. Beside the psychological barrier (which has very material foundations as the novel reveals), other membranes separate the human Daphnia from the sea of reality. Quite literally, the city she lives in lies “safe under the purple sky of a waterproof and earthquake-proof membrane, deep beneath the ocean, people lived out their days like flowers in a greenhouse” (26).
The skin is perhaps the most immediate membrane, protecting us against illness, except in Momo’s case where it failed to prevent the LOGO virus from slowly destroying her body. This necessitated the construction of Andy -an android specifically (and cruelly) designed to be “compatible” with Momo, to become her first friend and later her organ donor. Elegantly playing with the reader’s gendered expectations, Chi describes the surgical union of the sterile android Andy (sexed as female and gendered feminine) and the human girl Momo, who possesses a penis and is named after a mythical Japanese boy: “Did these two hands belong to Momo or Andy? Whose belly was this? She didn’t have a pee-pee, so that delicate flesh below her belly must have belonged to Andy!” (78).
Recalling Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking 1985-essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Chi reminds us that cyborgs are good to think with, especially when it comes to questions of gender and identity politics, because they are made, just as genders are made, of many (un)natural things in specific contexts. Cyborgs are neither/both human nor/and machine -they represent a messier approach to identity reiterated by Momo when she asks, “whose belly is this?” After all, that belly is home to many hundreds of species of bacteria with each their specific DNA as well as Momo’s “own” cells.
The most persistent membrane, however, exists between Momo and her mother. This is not the cellular membrane of a crustacean in the sea, but of a fetus in a womb. It is not a human merged with an android, but a child disjoined from a parent. Together with the android theme, the theme of parentage explores what it means to be and individual. If one individual can emerge from another, then where and when does individuality begin within all those layers of blood and uterine fluids. And, as Momo points out, emerging from one membrane into the other, one is still a caged canary.
In her dermic treatment work, Momo uses a kind of cream called M-skin which settles into a second skin on the client’s body. This skin is able to record sensory information and replay it through a computer: “Put simply, imagine the body is an old-style tape recorder and M-skin is a cassette: every stimulus experienced by Tomie Ito’s body was recorded like a sound. When Momo got the cassette and made a copy, she could play it on the tape recorder of her own body” (59).
From this angle, the skin is not our ward against the world, but our gateway to it, the line of encounter between inner and outer, I and you. Momo uses M-skin to spy on her clients and, in effect, live through their bodies, problematizing the habitual understanding of the skin as the boundary of the self. If one can share memories, share sensory experiences, share the most intimate moments, what remains of the singular I?
The novel is not only concerned with individuality and identity politics. There are subtle hints at social and political critique in the very structure of Momo’s ocean world: “The new sea-dwellers also left behind unwanted structures like pollution-producing factories and nuclear power plants (which meant, however, that some key personnel were forced to remain on the surface to man the reactors). Also left behind were prisons and various tools of punishment, since governments universally recognized that leaving convicts on the surface was actually a convenient punishment in and of itself” (22).
In the end, membranes are inescapable, and perhaps they are the very location of life. Just as the skin act as the zone of encounter between self and world, so is this wet origin of humanity, “the ocean: just a membrane on the surface of a giant apple” (67). Like the membranes present everywhere, Chi’s novel in Heinrich’s translation presents a view of reality that is certainly layered but also porous. If membranes are everywhere, they are also pierced, smeared, breached and rewoven. By encouraging a closer look at surfaces, the novel suggests that this is where much of our identity (social, sexual, species) resides and is constantly reconfigured. The core, the brain, the mind, or whatever we call it, does not thrive in vacuum, but needs and feeds on sensory stimuli from the boundaries of the body.
The Membranes is a fascinating and beautifully conceived novel, deceptively simple and alluringly deep, smoothly mediated by the membrane of Heinrich’s excellent translation. I can’t wait to get my hands on more of Chi’s work.
小说 XIAOSHUO 小說 