translation

NACS Panel: Crossing Boundaries in Sinophone SF

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Our panel of Sinophone sci-fi enthusiasts in Nordic universities has been accepted for this year’s Nordic Association for China Studies (NACS) conference in Gothenburg, Sweden June 8-9, 2023. Yippee!

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.

[6] Wang, 321.

[7] Neimanis, Astrida (2016): Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

中华未来学读本 Sinofuturisms Chinese version

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Thanks to Virginia L. Conn, Dino Ge Zhang +more, a selection of our collected essays on Sinofuturisms is now available in Chinese as 中华未来学读本 (I’m not sure where you can get it, but you can read the original English essays at SFRA Review):

SFRA Review 50(2-3): 2020

SPECIAL ISSUE: ALTERNATIVE SINOFUTURISMS / 中华未来主义 /  ZHONGHUA WEILAI ZHUYI

Sinofuturism and Chinese Science Fiction: an Introduction to the Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义) Special Issue  • Virginia L. Conn, editor

A Discussion between Two French Translators of Chinese Science Fiction  •  Loïc Aloisio and Gwennaël Gaffric

Photographesomenonic Sinofuturism(s)  •  Virginia L. Conn

Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism: China’s Future and the Denial of Coevalness  •  Gabriele de Seta

The Science-Fictional in China’s Online Learning Initiatives  •  Margaret A. Fisher

China’s Sonic Fictions: Music, Technology, and the Phantasma of a Sinicized Future  •  Carmen Herold

Empathy, War, and Women  • Amy Ireland

Capitalist Monster and Bottled Passengers: Political Stakes of Embodiment in The Reincarnated Giant and The Last Subway  •  Lyu Guangzhao

Data Narrator: Digital Chronotopes in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction  •  Astrid Møller-Olsen

Chinese Science Fiction: A Genre of Adversity  •  Yen Ooi

Images of Alternative Chinese Futures: Critical Reflections on the “China Dream” in Chen Qiufan’s “The Flower of Shazui”  •  Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker

The Wandering Earth: A Device for the Propagation of the Chinese Regime’s Desired Space Narratives?  •  Molly Silk

Wondering about the Futures of the Wandering Earth: A Comparative Analysis of Liu Cixin’s “The Wandering Earth” and Frant Gwo’s Film Adaptation  •  Mitchell van Vuren

A Diagnosis of Sinofuturism from the Urban-Rural Fringe  •  Dino Ge Zhang

Oxford Plants and People

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This autumn I’m visting scholar at the University of Oxford China Centre, hosted by the awesome prof. Margaret Hillenbrand. In between visits to Oxford botanic garden and arboretum, Rousham gardens, Waterperry gardens and Batsford arboretum, I met a lot of really interesting and knowledgeable people (as well as plants).

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 to share 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.

For more from my Green Ink project, see “Trees Keep Time An Ecocritical Approach to Literary Temporality” in Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature edited by Riccardo Moratto, Nicoletta Pesaro and Di-kai Chao (Routledge 2022) and stay tuned for my forthcoming chapter on plant-human chimeras in speculative fiction.

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.

Stories Grow in Hong Kong: 𝑂𝑓 𝐹𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐻𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑠 review

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My review was first publish in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal on September 1st, 2022.

Monika Gaenssbauer and Nicholas Olczak (editors). Of Forests and Humans: Hong Kong Contemporary Short Fiction. Edition Cathay, vol. 74, Bochum, Projekt Verlag, 2019.

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/

Wang Xiaobo: Sex as Power

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Last week I had a conversation on Danish radio about Wang Xiaobo’s 王小波 ‘The Golden Age’ 黄金时代 and ‘Gentle like Water’ 似水柔情 recently translated into Danish by Sidse Laugesen for Korridor publishers.

We discussed sex as an arena for power struggles as well as a last expression of individual freedom under repressive conditions and forced collectivisation.

In particular, I read Wang’s focus on illicit sexualities that deviate from the perceived norm -such as non-monogamous or homosexual relationships- as cynical but in some sense hopeful explorations of bodily freedom in situations of extreme control, in this case prison (in ‘Gentle like Water’) and rural work camps for ‘educated youth’ 知青 (in ‘The Golden Age’).

Faraway with Lo Yi-Chin

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Lo, Yi-Chin. Faraway. Translated by Jeremy Tiang. Columbia University Press: 2021.

Faraway

Faraway is a story of transitions: between life and death, between losing a parent and becoming one. In Jeremy Tiang‘s able translation a further set of transitions take place: between reader and writer (the translator starts out as one and becomes the other), between one language and another.

The novel chronicles Taiwanese protagonist Lo Yi-Chin’s (the author’s fictionalized counterpart) struggle with health care bureaucracy as he does his best to bring home his comatose father who has suffered a massive brain hemorrhage while holidaying in mainland China.

The holiday was the elder Lo’s first return to his ancestral Jiangxi province (and to the Chinese mainland) since 1949 when he left his first wife and son behind and fled to Taiwan with the Kuomintang troops. After his stroke, the trip that began as a homecoming transitions into an awkward meeting between two long-separated branches of the Lo clan: the Taiwanese family and their mainland relatives.

Reading Faraway, I felt constantly curious about what the women of this drama felt. Did the abandoned first wife feel resentful towards her younger and more affluent successor? Or curios about her faraway lifestyle? How did she feel about having to recognize and treat as head of the extended family this man whom she had not seen for more than half a century? How did the Taiwanese wife feel about being confronted with a stepson only a decade younger than herself? And, perhaps most of all, I wondered about the protagonist’s own wife, left behind in the final stages of pregnancy in an echo of his father’s abandonment of his first wife.

But this is a story of fathers and sons. Of the life-changing transition from being someone’s son to being someone’s father. Of the baffling responsibility of suddenly finding yourself the stand-in for the debilitated patriarch, head of a large family you hardly know, much less understand.

One of the lingering tastes that characterizes Faraway is irony. The narrative exposes both the blatant prejudice that the urbane, Taiwanese protagonist feels for his hillbilly mainland relatives and the ambivalent emotions of indebtedness and contempt they evoke in him.

This theme is poetically mediated through continuous references to primeval lifeforms. Such imagery is used to signify the mental regression of the father after his brain hemorrhage – “this old man, so stuffed full of tubes, like a fossilized crawling bug” – as well as the protagonist’s mainland roots, so distant and primitive they seem almost prehistoric.

Lost in my Life (receipts)
by Rachel Perry Welty,
MIT List via Cuseum

My overall impression of the novel is a very dense narrative, a paper river overflowing with a tremendous number of tedious details upon the waves of which glitter sudden bursts of simple and breathtaking literary beauty, confidently and delicately translated by Tiang: “I stood behind her, gazing at her profile, which was very like my wife’s but drawn with a thicker pencil. She told this story in the gloom, leaving indelible marks of sadness.”

And the boring and excessive details are there for a reason. Collectively they make up the form and shape of despair. Faraway is the fictionalized account of Lo Yi-Chin’s own experiences of the deep grief and eyewatering paperwork associated with a sudden and serious illness abroad. Rather than spelling out the emotional responses of the main characters, the narrative expresses the feelings of abandonment, meaninglessness, and Kafkaesque bewilderment through painstakingly detailed accounts of everyday consumption and bureaucracy.

Lo’s style is cinematic, a style that his fictional counterpart seems to share according to one of his friends, who asks him “Hey, Lo, how come your stories are so weird – all those characters with blurry faces running around huge, empty, ‘abandoned’ spaces?”  Both author and narrator are drawn to “no-places” (such as airports or hospitals) where, outwardly, nothing much happens, but emotionally, everything is at stake. And they convey this duality through terse narrative teeming with supposedly unimportant little details floating upon, and concealing, an ocean of emotions beneath. 

And the faces of the novel’s characters do seem blurred. If we get to know the narrator -the camera man of the cinematic narrative- at all, it is through his framing of the views we are presented with. Everything else remains a background of blurred faces.

The perfect filmic ending comes at page 227, when the narrator walks into the sunset with his son: “In this way, I led this beloved person sadly through a landscape of true emptiness, the outlines of our faces blurring into shadow in the faint light.” Here, all the metafictional elements come together in a shot of the father and son surrounded by emptiness, blurred into archetypes.

But the novel doesn’t end here. In reality, death is often messy, disgusting, boring, fatiguing, and drawn-out. And so, Faraway continues to tell the story of a fatherless man who struggles to be a father amidst the absurd chaos of everyday life, of a young boy for whom death is now a recurring part of life. The text ends in a horrible shopping mall, littered with grotesque animal corpses discarded as consumer goods. The transitions continue, hopefuly with more of Lo’s work in translation.

Read an English translation of Lo’s “The Body Transporter” here.

Owlish and Other Translated Languages with Natascha Bruce

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In this fourth episode, award-winning translator Natascha Bruce talks about wormbooks, birdcats and owlfish, about haunting Hong Kong protests, and about keeping alive uncanny textual elements across languages. She reveals how it was to translate 謝曉虹 Dorothy Tse’s 鷹頭貓與音樂箱女孩 Eaglehead Cat and the Music Box Girl (which I make a hash of explaining in the episode) into Owlish (which Natasha has brilliantly come up with as the English title). We talk about literature that speaks to you in its own voice and begs to be translated, about taming or not taming long, meandering sentences and about the strangeness that spills over from one language to the next. Listen here:

Y1 Ep4 w. Natascha Bruce

Migratory Catbird

Natascha Bruce translates fiction, creative non-fiction and, occasionally, poetry from Chinese into English. Her work includes many short stories, especially by the Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse, as well as the novel Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon and the short story collection Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong. Her current projects include the novels Mystery Train by Can Xue and Owlish by Dorothy Tse. She has recently moved to Amsterdam.

Resident Birdcat

Astrid Møller-Olsen is international research fellow with the Universities of Lund, Stavanger, and Oxford, funded by the Swedish Research Council. She has a degree in comparative literature and Chinese studies and has published on fictional dictionaries, oneiric soundscapes, digital chronotopes in science fiction, ecocritical temporalities, and sensory urban spacetime. Her first monograph Sensing the Sinophone will be published in January 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/

Other birds in the podcast

File:Rose-ringed Parakeet RWD.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Green parrots are feral rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri) growing populations of which make their home in Central and Northern Europe and have recently made it to Southern Sweden (I misremembered, it was in Skåne, not Norway, I saw them, but still, not the place you expect green parrots).

Bubo blakistoni.jpg

Fish owl is a subspecies found in East and Southeast Asia. I would really like to meet one.

File:Kattuggla Tawny Owl (14129656552).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Cat owl is the Swedish name (kattuggla) for Strix aluco, tawny owl in English, night owl (natugle) in Dainsh and grey forest owl (灰林鴞) in Chinese.

Sinopticon: A Starship Library

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Sinopticon is the brainchild of Xueting Christine Ni who has done an amazing work of collecting, translating, and introducing 13 new SF stories from contemporary China. The stories span two decades and incorporate a variety of themes from galactic existentialism in Han Song’s “Tombs of the Universe” (宇宙墓碑 1991) to Ma Boyong’s hardboiled-style space age take on Chinese holiday traffic chaos in “The Great Migration” (大冲运 2021).

The overweight of male protagonists, casual gender stereotyping, and the odd dash of not too subtle patriotism made me a bit tired at times, but luckily several of the stories depart from this pattern. Jiang Bo’s “Starship: Library” (宇宙尽头的书店) combines a structure reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” with Arthur C. Clarke’s Monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey to explore the difference between knowledge and learning. I prefer Ni’s evocative title over the more literal translation “the bookshop at the end of the universe” (the Douglas Adams reference is getting a little worn), and the idea of a roaming library piloted by a contemporary incarnation of an ancient Chinese goddess will excite bibliophiles of all galaxies.

Each story is followed by an anecdotal epilogue introducing the author and offering a mini-interpretation of the narrative, which, combined with foot notes explaining Chinese terms and idioms as well as a list of author bios at the end of the book, is a bit too much guidance for my taste. But who am I to talk, I’m offering up my own readings all the time including right now. Anyway, one can just skip on to the next story.

Other interventions are more fruitful, like the decision to title Anna Wu’s story “戴珍珠耳环的少女” (the girl with the pearl earring) in the original Dutch as “Meisje met de Parel” to avoid confusion with other literary and cinematographic works inspired by of Vermeer’s painting. Adding another language to the layers of time and pigments that envelop the story only makes the fabric of the narrative more intriguing. Each English title is subtitled by the original Chinese title, which, as well as being is enormously helpful for researchers, is also a simple and beautiful way of reminding the reader of the multiplicity of languages and people involved in bring these stories to them.

Recurring topics include a renewed appreciation for the cultural history of Earth stemming from a futurist and/or intergalactic perspective in Han Song and Tang Fei’s stories, posthuman explorations of the humaneness of cyborgs in Wang Jinkang and Nian Yu’s work, and new regimes for AI that include social intelligence (Hao Jingfang) and process-oriented learning (Jiang Bo). An interesting deviation from classic SF figures of robots and spaceships is A Que’s “Flower of the Other Shore” (彼岸花) – an ecocritical zombie story featuring a Rome and Juliet romance between an “uncontaminated” (not yet subjected to the zombie virus) human woman and a male protagonist who is a hybrid between a Chinese jiangshi (僵尸 stiff corpse/jumping vampire) and a Hollywood zombie. Xueting Christine Ni talks about this story in the most recent episode of the Sinophone Unrealities podcast available here.

I definitely enjoyed some stories more than others, but all in all, am delighted and grateful to Ni and her crew for all their work in making this beautiful collection of authors and stories available to an Anglophone audience: A new addition our collective starship library.

TOC

Foreword, Xia Jia
Introduction, Xuenting Christine Ni
The Last Save, Gu Shi
Tombs of the Universe, Han Song
Qiankun and Alex, Hao Jingfang
Cat’s Chance in Hell, Nian Yu
The Return of Adam, Wang Jinkang
Rendezvous: 1937, Zhao Haihong
The Heart of the Museum, Tang Fei
The Great Migration, Ma Boyong
Meisje met de Parel, Anna Wu
Flower of the Other Shore, A Que
The Absolution Experiment, Bao Shu
The Tide of Moon City, Regina Kanyu Wang
Starship: Library, Jiang Bo

Science Fiction is a Many-gendered Thing: Regina Kanyu Wang

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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.

Listen here

Artwork by Joanne Taylor/NettOp/UiS

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/

Intimate Stories from Taiwan

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Review of “Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers: An Anthology”, edited by Jonathan Stalling, Lin Tai-man and Yanwing Leung.

In his foreword to this anthology, Jonathan Stalling eloquently describes how “Taiwan literature, like its complex writing systems, exists as a palimpsest of the cultural contact points, overlapping languages, peoples, and histories that have paved the way for one of the most vibrant literary scenes in the Sinosphere and the world beyond.” The aptness of this delightful description is borne out by what follows, namely 11 diverse, yet eminently readable, short stories and essays written between 1976 and 2013.

If any single thing connects all these stories, it is intimacy. Each of these very different narratives (some are simple and anecdotal, others elaborately literary and still others read like personal reminiscences or diary entries) circles around human relationships. The array of intimate relationships include the emancipation of a meek young woman from her egocentric husband; the invention of a much longed for imaginary son by a single woman tired of playing the field; the extremely brief but life-changing mentor-student liaison between a successful fake socialite and an up-coming rich-husband hunter, as well as the parasitic mother daughter bond presented in sensuous and colorful prose—almost like a revolting yet fascinating surrealist painting.

These stories also possess a kind of sensuality, which begets a different type of intimacy—between reader and text this time—that is deeply satisfying and engaging: interior and private smellscapes in “A Place of One’s Own” share the protagonist’s sensation of how “body odor from Liang-ch’i floated up toward her, the faint smell of cigarette smoke and perspiration. She had never had a male in this room before.”

In “Taipei Train Station”, the mind’s eye of the reader is called upon visualize the public and exterior space of a city where “buses dashed over streets, their metallic sides aglow in the light. The shine and swish they left in their wake enveloped the city as if with fish scales that flashed with every move.”

These stories describe Taiwanese society from 1980s to 2010s (with the notable exception of the final story “The Fish”, which—dating from 1976 and dealing with the Cultural Revolution in mainland China—hangs on like an out of place appendix) and thus also touch on the tremendous changes in economy, politics and lifestyle that took place during those years.

A literary showcase of life in such transitional times is displayed by the generational conflict at the heart of Chung Wenyin’s “The Travels and Lover of a Junior High Girl”. Here, the protagonist’s mother, who was born in poverty and has finally risen to a life of wealth and luxury, refuses let go of her Gucci purse to go swim with her children. Her daughter, on the other hand, who has grown up in relative affluence and financial security, longs for untraditional love affairs and a simple life closer to nature: “I truly wished that my mother would come and see the fates of other women — take off her expensive shoes, tread barefoot on the earth, and feel the chill or heat.”

The cultural and linguistic amalgamation, which Stalling describes as characteristic of Taiwan literature, is exemplified in several of the stories: in “The Story of Hsiao-Pi” the Taiwanese Mrs Pi struggles to speak Mandarin with her Guomindang husband; in “Seed of the Rape Plant” the protagonist’s Japanese housewife schooling proves redundant in modern-day Taiwan; and the narrator in “The Party Girl” comes to realize that a knowledge of foreign languages is essential in order to crash and successfully shine at fashionable gatherings.

But why a separatist anthology of only female authors? Dr Olga Castro wrote last year in in The Conversation that “in an ideal world, women’s presence in literature and translation should not have to be ensured by gender-specific prizes, anthologies and supplements. Instead, their work should be placed in generalist and genderless ways alongside men’s.”

Our world, however, especially when it comes to translated works, is far from ideal. According to Castro (who cites the VIDA Count of women in the literary arts), “generalist publishers have been found to have obvious gender-biased attitudes when selecting titles for translation, and the work of women writers is far less often chosen for inclusion in translation anthologies…”

This anthology therefore does its bit to redress the balance. And from a Sinophone perspective, it bears witness to the remarkably rich literary scene in Taiwan as well as to the fact that a not insignificant number of the island’s best authors happen to be female.

Fortunately, these stories have more in common than the fact that they are written by Taiwanese women. They are short and delicious samples of human curiosity, humor, suffering, politics and love. They are very well translated and well mixed as if for a literary buffet. The editors have thoughtfully provided bibliographical information on each story’s original publication so that the hungry reader can easily sample more of new discovered favorites.

First published for asianreviewofbooks.com