BALESTIER PRESS, THE ART OF IDEAS — IN TRANSLATION

You think being a small indie publisher is challenging? Then trying being a small indie publisher who focuses on translations from Chinese! Today, Nicky Harman interviews Roh-Suan Tung, of Balestier Press, about what propelled him into publishing, his favourite books and his hopes for the future.

Founded in 2013, Balestier Press is an independent publisher of Asian literature and books related to Asia, including novels, essays and picture books, for children, young adults and adults. Balestier aims to provide a diverse platform for the different voices in Asia by publishing the best and most innovative Asian literature. Director Roh-Suan Tung says: “We hope to promote a greater cultural understanding and awareness of Asia, to tell the story of an evolving Asia through its people, culture, literature and artistic expressions."

NH Can you tell me how and why you got into publishing? I understand you came from a science background.

RT 

I started by publishing newsletters on media freedom in Taiwan in the 80s. I then became a theoretical physicist and served as editor for international journals and academic publishing for a few years. I enjoyed exploring the frontiers of physics and our understanding of the cosmos, and I appreciate the value of science, but I’ve always felt the need for more English-language publications in literary arts and humanities. Partly because I’ve lived in quite a few major cities in the east and the west.

Circumstance / A Yellow House

If you're in Singapore do come along to the Asia launch of Circumstance by Rosie Milne, editor of Asian Books Blog, at the Singapore Writers Festival.

Circumstance is launching alongside A Yellow House  by Karien Van Ditzhuijzen.

Details: Sunday 11 Nov, 3.30 pm, the Arts House. See you here, I hope!!

A Death in Peking. Guest post from Graeme Sheppard

The brutal murder of 19-year-old Pamela Werner in Peking one night in January 1937 shocked the world, and the police never named the murderer. The best-selling book Midnight in Peking, by Paul French, declared the perpetrator to be an American dentist, but Graeme Sheppard, a retired British policeman with 30 years’ service in the UK, with the  Metropolitan Police, decided that conclusion was flawed. After spending years investigating the case, he came up with an entirely different conclusion. So who did it? Who killed Pamela?

Over to Graeme...

Elaine Chiew Talks to Ng Yi-Sheng, author of Lion City

Photo Courtesy: Epigram Books

 Ng Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean poet, fictionist, playwright, journalist and LGBT+ activist. He has just published Lion City, his first collection of short stories, inspired by speculative fiction, Singaporean history and myth. He’s currently working on a novel as part of a Creative Writing PhD at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and a performance lecture for the Singapore Fringe Festival, titled Ayer Hitam: A Black History of Singapore.

His books include the poetry collections last boy (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2008), Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and A Book of Hims; the movie novelisation Eating Air and the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21^st Century. Additionally, he translated Wong Yoon Wah’s Chinese poetry collection The New Village and he has co-edited publications such as GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose, Eastern Heathens: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore and SingPoWriMo 2018.

He has also been active in the professional theatre since the age of 17, collaborating with companies such as TheatreWorks, W!ld Rice, Toy Factory and Musical Theatre Ltd to create plays like Hungry, 251, Georgette, The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles and Reservoir. He is a founding member of the spoken word troupe the Party Action People and co-organised the annual queer literary reading ContraDiction for twelve years.

Photo Courtesy: Epigram Books

EC:      Welcome to AsianBooksBlog, Yi-Sheng. A real honour to have you.

First, congratulations on the publication of Lion City (Epigram Books), which will be launched at the Singapore Writers’Festival 2018. It’s a fantastic read, full of mordant humour, allegorical fabulism, political heft, and a willingness to say the unsayable.

NYS:    Thanks so much! I’m so pleased you liked it.

EC:      Praise for the book, notably Sharlene Teo, likens your stories and voice to Etgar Keret. Also Neil Gaiman. Are they influences?   

NYS:   Neil Gaiman’s been a massive influence on me: as a teenager in the 90s I read the Sandman and Books of Magic comics while they were coming out, and had my mind utterly blown by the idea of this globally (and cosmically) unified mythology and by the idea that magic’s just lurking at the edges of the contemporary urban world. Neverwhere, Marvel 1602, Smoke and Mirrors and The Graveyard Book have been great favourites too.

I’m afraid I’ve never read Etgar Keret, but I must: Lavie Tidhar also said I sounded like him.

500 words from Jo Furniss

500 words from is an occasional series in which novelists talk about their new novels. Jo Furniss has recently brought out The Trailing Spouse.

After spending a decade as a broadcast journalist for the BBC, Jo became a freelance writer and serial expatriate. Originally from the United Kingdom, she spent seven years in Singapore and also lived in Switzerland and Cameroon. Jo’s debut novel, All the Little Children, was an Amazon Charts bestseller.

The Trailing Spouse is a novel of marriage, betrayal, and murder set in Singapore. Amanda Bonham moved halfway around the world to be with the man she loves. Although expat life in Singapore can be difficult, Edward Bonham is a dream husband and a doting father to his teenage daughter, Josie. But when their maid dies in an apparent suicide, Amanda can’t help but wonder if her perfect husband has a fatal flaw. And if he can’t resist temptation under their own roof, what does he get up to when he travels? Camille Kemble also has questions for Edward. Recently returned to Singapore, Camille is determined to resolve a family mystery. Amid a jumble of faded childhood memories, she keeps seeing Edward’s handsome face. And she wants to know why. For one woman, the search for answers threatens everything she has. For another, it’s the key to all she lost. Both are determined to find the truth.

So, over to Jo...

Backlist books: The Annotated Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace (edited by John van Wyhe)

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia.

This post is about The Annotated Malay Archipelago, a version of the book that 19th-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote based on journals from his eight-year journey among the islands of Southeast Asia several years after his return to England. It was originally published in two volumes in 1869, and has never been out of print.

Wallace, a contemporary and correspondent of Charles Darwin, helped develop, or at least accepted early on, Darwin’s theory of natural selection and plotted what is now known as the Wallace Line, which separates the two ecologically distinct zones of Asia and Australia.

Contemporary readers will probably wince at Wallace’s “kill and collect” approach to studying exotic birds and mammals and abhor his characteristically Victorian racist generalisations about the physical and moral characteristics of the Asian people he encountered. Nevertheless, his work is worth reading. Wallace was an intrepid adventurer intent on studying creatures in far-flung lands, and his fascination with the wonders of the natural world continues to inspire joy.

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read The Annotated Malay Archipelago, or what you should know about it even if you never do!

Indie Spotlight: Matthew Legare

Indie spotlight focusses on self-published authors and self-publishing. Here, Matthew Legare discusses his new novel Shadows of Tokyo, the first in a projected historical thriller-noir series set in pre-World War II Japan. The second book, Smoke Over Tokyo, is coming soon.

Matthew is an indie author publishing under the Black Mist Books imprint. He also reviews new fiction and interviews authors on his blog.

So, over to Matthew…

On translation, by Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman, Yan Ge, Natascha Bruce

Let’s talk literary translation, or how to keep audiences riveted by swearing at them

Last week, I was at Cheltenham Literary Festival, appearing on a panel with Yan Ge and Natascha Bruce. We had carte blanche to talk about Translating China, but decided to focus on Yan Ge’s new novel, The Chilli BeanPaste Clan (Chinese: 《我们家》) because (let’s be honest) it helps sales, and because the three of us all had plenty to say about the book.

The Chilli Bean Paste Clan is set in a fictional town in West China and is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the town’s lucrative chilli bean paste factory, their formidable matriarch, and her badly-behaved, middle-aged son. As the old lady’s eightieth birthday approaches, her children get together to make preparations. Tensions that have simmered for many years come to the surface, family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling rivalries flare up with renewed vigour. 

The Deer and the Cauldron, guest post by John Minford

Between 1997 and 2002, John Minford, now Emeritus Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University, brought out a three-volume translation of the rollicking Chinese martial arts novel, called, in English, The Deer and the Cauldron, with Oxford University Press Hong Kong (OUP HK). Now OUP UK has published it in the UK.  As John explains: "I worked on the translation with David Hawkes, my father-in-law, and, on the last volume, with my late wife Rachel May, for about 10 years from the mid 1990s."

John here writes about the sprawling and beguiling example of Chinese popular culture he and his collaborators worked on for so long.

Oxford University Press Pakistan book fair

The annual month-long Oxford Book Fair, organized by Oxford University Press (OUP), is running until 7 November at Oxford bookshops in cities throughout Pakistan. The much-awaited yearly event always draws a large number of visitors.  The selection of books featured includes both locally published and imported children's books, English Language Teaching material, reference books, and school and higher education textbooks.

For the general reader, there are non-fiction titles on international affairs, politics, history, anthropology, women’s studies, art, and literature.

Biographies and memoirs of prominent Pakistani personalities are being showcased.

Oxford’s hallmark English and bi-lingual dictionaries and thesauruses are available at special, reduced prices.

A Yellow House: Elaine Chiew Talks to Karien van Ditzhuijzen

Credit: Lina Meissen Photography

After a childhood of moving around Asia, the Middle East and Europe, Karien van Ditzhuijzen moved to Singapore in 2012. Karien has a degree in chemical engineering, but gave up her career developing ice cream recipes to become a writer. She now dedicates her life (in no particular order) to advocating migrant workers’ rights, her family, her pet chicken and being entertained by monkeys while writing at the patio of her jungle house.

As a freelance writer and blogger Karien contributes to several publications in Singapore and the Netherlands. In 2012 she published a children’s book in Dutch recounting her childhood in Borneo. Karien van Ditzhuijzen’s debut novel A Yellow House was published by Monsoon Books in 2018. This poignant coming-of-age story, told in the voice of inquisitive ten-year-old Maya, explores the plight of migrant domestic workers in Singapore and the relationships they form with the families they work for.

Karien has been working with migrant domestic workers since 2012, when she joined HOME, a charity that supports migrant workers in Singapore. In the following years Karien worked closely with domestic worker writers, documenting their stories and sharing them on the blog www.myvoiceathome.org and as editor of the anthology 'Our Homes, Our Stories'.

The strong women Karien met through her charity work were the inspiration for A Yellow House.

500 words from Robert F. Delaney

500 words from is an occasional series in which novelists talk about their new novels. Robert F. Delaney has just brought out The Wounded Muse.

Robert has been covering China as a journalist for media outlets including Dow Jones Newswires and Bloomberg News since 1995, and was recently appointed U.S. Bureau Chief for the South China Morning Post. In his spare time, he turned to writing about the personal struggles of those caught in the middle of China’s ongoing transformation into an economic powerhouse. Many of the themes for The Wounded Muse were first developed in his earlier collection, Route 1 to China. Robert now splits his time between New York City and Toronto.

The Wounded Muse, a novel based on actual events, follows Qiang as he returns to his homeland, China, from Silicon Valley, during the lead up to the 2008 Olympic Games. In Beijing, he finds wrecking balls are knocking down entire neighborhoods to make way for fancy modern structures. Qiang begins shooting footage of the tumult for a documentary. When he’s arrested, it falls on his sister, Diane, and an American journalist, Jake, to figure out how to end his detention. With different ideas about how to approach a vast Chinese security apparatus, Diane and Jake don’t know how to trust each other. Meanwhile, Dawei, an itinerant Jake befriended years earlier, returns to Beijing to retrieve a memento that has suddenly become valuable. Dawei finds himself ensnared in a plan to force the authorities to release Qiang.

So, over to Robert…

Remembering Vietnam and Shanghai by Tess Johnston

Diplomat, author and historian Tess Johnston has published extensively about Asia, including 15 books about architecture in Shanghai.

An American, Tess has lived and served abroad with the US Foreign Service and the Consulate General, for more than half a century, including more than 40 years in Asia. Her first Asian posting was to Vietnam from 1967-74, at the height of the war; her second was to Shanghai, where she lived and worked for more than 3 decades.

In Saigon, Tess snared a job with one of the most famous,or infamous, of American wartime leaders, John Paul Vann.

In her latest book, A War Away: An American Woman in Vietnam, 1967-1974 Tess recounts stories of her Vietnam years, including her eye-witness account of the Tet Offensive, and what it was like to be one the few American women there during those harrowing years.

Tess has an abiding love for both Vietnam and Shanghai. Here she compares her memories of each place.

So, over to Tess…

Indie spotlight dual edition: (2) Understanding how to market on Amazon

Indie spotlight focusses on self-published authors and self-publishing. Here, in the second of today’s Indie spotlight dual edition, Ilan Nass, from Taktical Digital in New York City, gives general advice on how sellers can maximise sales through Amazon. Indie authors can adapt this advice to suit their own aim: selling books.

Indie spotlight dual edition: (1) Christie Dao on Actualize Your Dreams

Indie spotlight focusses on self-published authors and self-publishing. Here, in the first of today’s Indie spotlight dual edition, Christie Dao, a Vietnamese-American now based in Singapore, explains how she came to publish her inspirational book, Actualize Your Dreams, and why it was important for her to work with an Asian-American editor.

Christie Dao was born in Vietnam and moved to the United States as a 12-year-old. After graduating high school and gaining a full-tuition scholarship, Christie finished her bachelor’s degree one year ahead of schedule. After earning her master's degree, she relocated to Singapore as an employee of Intel Asia Pacific. She has lived and worked in Singapore for the last 18 years.

Actualize Your Dreams: from wishful thinking to reality is Christie’s self-portrait of growing up in an Asian household in the United States. It charts her determination to achieve and obtain her personal education and career goals from her teenage years until today. Learning English and the cultural norms Americans take for granted were just two of the stumbling blocks she encountered as a new immigrant to America. But she overcame the barriers, and her life came full-circle when her career brought her back to Asia, the continent she left as a 12-year-old.

So, over to Christie…

On translation by Nicky Harman

Spot the authors: Jia Pingwa, Mo Yan and Tie Ning are in the front row. Also in the picture are Alai, Yu Hua, Lu Min and many many others.

A MIXED BAG OF CHINESE AUTHORS AND TRANSLATORS, Guiyang, 2018
Nicky Harman reports on a meeting of minds.

The International Sinologists Conference on Translating Chinese Literature (汉学家文学翻译国际研讨会FISCTCL) brings authors from all over China and translators from all over the world, to a different venue in China every two years. This year, we were in Guiyang, China, for the fifth biennial conference. Despite the unwieldy title and even more unwieldy acronym, it is an extremely enjoyable event, one of a kind, giving translators a chance to meet and bend the ear of their authors (or people whom they would like to translate) and giving authors the chance to learn more about the process of translation and the promotion of their works overseas. FISCTCL is run by the China Writers Association (CWA), who have done a brilliant job over the last decade adapting the initially rather formal conference format, to the quirky demands of a bunch of maverick, enthusiastic and creative translators! The upshot is that for the last two FISCTCLs, we have spent most of the two days in discussion groups of about twenty. Depending on the mood and composition of the group, individuals can either give a presentation they have prepared in advance or have a free discussion.

Lion City lit: Inez Tan launches her debut short story collection

This Is Where I Won’t Be Alone: Stories launched in Singapore this weekend at Kinokuniya’s main store. Carissa Foo, who wrote If It Were Up to Mrs Dada (Epigram Books, 2018) led a discussion with the collection’s author, Inez Tan.

Inez spoke about the inspiration for the first two stories in the anthology, “Edison and Curie,” and “Oyster”. “Edison and Curie,” is about a pair of twins who differ greatly in their academic aptitude. The story is psychologically complex, exploring different aspects of identity, success, and coming of age. Inez explained that this story was born from a “collision” of different experiences and ideas. In particular, she spoke of Einstein’s famous twin paradox as an initial catalyst for the creation of “Edison and Curie”. The next story in the collection, “Oyster,” is grounded in a more personal experience. Inez began writing it after her mother gifted her some dried oysters to take back to the United States. Although “Oyster” was inspired by a real-world incident, the story itself brings us out of reality and into the imaginary realm of an oyster’s thoughts. The oyster arrives into a family fridge, and its unfamiliarity with our world gives us an interesting perspective on human relationships.

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?

Student bookshelf: Review and analysis of A Pearl in the Forest

Aurelia Paul recently graduated from Boston University, where she was studying comparative literature and Chinese. In her column Student bookshelf, she shares responses to materials she has explored in her classes.

Today, Aurelia will be discussing a Mongolian film that came out in 2008, Enkhtaivan Agvaantseren’s A Pearl in the Forest.

The Buryat People and Historical Background

This work comments on the persecution of Buryat refugees in Mongolia in the 1930s. The Buryats are the dominant ethnic minority group that lives in Siberia. They speak their own language, also called Buryat. This language is similar to Mongolian and uses the Cyrillic script. Buryats, like Mongols, traditionally live nomadically in gers. However, because of close contact with Russia, some Buryat settlements have become agricultural. People living in these settlements often reside in Russian-style wooden houses, which can be seen in the film. 

In 1923 the Soviet administration created the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Union. However, Stalin was alarmed by the possibility of Soviet resistance from the Buryat community, and so ordered a campaign against them. Thousands of people died as a result of this ethnic violence, and numerous Buddhist sites of worship were destroyed.

Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission. Guest post by Dorothy Wong

Dorothy C. Wong is Professor of Art and Director of the East Asian Center at the University of Virginia. She has published Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form (2004; Chinese edition 2011), Hōryūji Reconsidered (editor and contributing author, 2008), and China and Beyond in the Mediaeval Period: Cultural Crossings and Inter-regional Connections (co-editor with Gustav Heldt, and contributing author, 2014). Her most recent book is Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission: The International Buddhist Art Style in East Asia, ca. 645-770.

In the mid-seventh century, a class of Buddhist pilgrim-monks disseminated an art style in China, Japan, and Korea that was uniform in both iconography and formal properties. Traveling between the courts and religious centers of the region, these pilgrim-monks played a powerful role in this proto-cosmopolitanism, promulgating what came to be known as the International Buddhist Art Style.    

Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission: The International Buddhist Art Style in East Asia, ca. 645-770 investigates the formation and circulation of an East Asian International Buddhist Art Style by focusing on the role played by Buddhist missionaries and pilgrim-monks as agents of cultural and artistic transmissions.

So, over to Dorothy...