As a follow-up to Rosie Milne's post on THE BOOK OF SHANGHAI, I have been thinking about what makes a good introduction to contemporary Chinese literature, and what can persuade new readers to dip a toe in unknown waters. Logically, short stories should be a good way in, because length-wise, they don’t require too much commitment. But I am someone who loves to immerse myself in a full-length novel, so I approached The Book of Shanghai with, let’s say, an open mind.
Historically, Shanghai has had a powerful grip on the western imagination. Of course, it was always much more than the exotic den of iniquity it was portrayed as. As Jin Li, one of the editors, writes in his excellent introduction, ‘The influences of a recently industrialized West mingled, interacted and cross-pollinated with the traditions of a culture that had developed over many centuries. As a contact point between East and West, with its unique location, Shanghai paved the way, acting as a testing site where various ideological and cultural ideas were welcomed, accommodated and re-imagined.’
But that was then, and now is now. In The Book of Shanghai, the picture emerges of a thoroughly modern city. These stories scarcely even hint at Shanghai’s exotic or insalubrious past. Instead, they describe the human condition as it is today. Not that all the stories are realistic. Some are quite fantastical and have beguilingly strange protagonists. But all of them are rooted in the present... or the future.
Showing posts with label Shanghai Contemporary Writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shanghai Contemporary Writers. Show all posts
Wednesday 24 June 2020
Monday 17 September 2018
Review: Labyrinth of the Past by Zhang Yiwei
While I was in Shanghai, I stumbled across a series oftranslated Chinese fiction, headlined as Stories
by Contemporary Writers from Shanghai and published jointly by Better Link
Press (New York) and Shanghai Press and Publishing Development Company. The editor of the series is Wang Jiren. His
Foreword stated that the series comprises writers who are immigrants to
Shanghai, but most were born in the city from a period encompassing the late
1940s to the 1980s, and includes well-known writers such as Wang Anyi, Xiao Bai and Sun
Ganlu, but also features young emerging writers such as Zhang Yiwei, whose
short story collection, Labyrinth of the Past (2015) is reviewed here.
From age 5 to 22, Zhang Yiwei grew up in Tianlin, a
neighbourhood in Xuhui District, southwest Shanghai. The seven bittersweet
nostalgic stories in this collection describe a childhood in Tianlin and the bordering
town of Xiaozha that were undergoing rapid transformation and industrialisation in the '80s, from farmlands to organised apartment complexes for factory workers. This changing
landscape evokes the lives of Chinese workers, tinged sometimes with desolation,
anonymity, and a deep sense of loss. Zhang Yiwei’s collection is particularly noteworthy for its observation of
details both past and current, and for its angle of approach – these are
stories about young women of the ‘80s and ‘90s growing up raised by single
mothers. The broken family connections echo the breaking up of landscape, all in the name of progress, but the stories seem to whisper:
at what cost?
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