Indie Spotlight: A New Year, A New Page Forward

Happy Chinese New Year! I’m indie WWII historical fiction author Alexa Kang, and it is my honor to begin the Year of the Ox as the Asian Books Blog's new Indie Spotlight Editor. You might have read my previous guest posts here and here. Going forward, I hope to bring you your next great reads.

 

Indie publishing has come a long way since Amazon opened the door in 2010 for authors to bring their stories directly to readers. The market of indie-publishing has matured since then. While writers can now release their books through online retailers, that alone is not enough for the books to reach and gain an audience. Successful indie writers today not only must offer quality books that can match and compete with traditionally published books, they must also be savvy in branding, marketing, and e-commerce.

 

My foray into indie writing was serendipitous. It began in 2016. I never aspired to be a fiction author. I was writing fan fiction for fun within the global fandom of the Japanese manga series, Candy Candy. My fanfic was very well-received, and was fan-translated into multiple languages. After my fanfic, I started writing a spin-off story from Candy Candy, with characters entirely of my own creation who I imagined to be children of the cast of Candy Candy. That spin-off story would ultimately become my debut WWII series Rose of Anzio.

 

I wrote Rose of Anzio over the course of a year. Each week, I would post a new chapter on a Candy Candy fan forum. I still remember fondly the days when Candy Candy fans who followed my story would eagerly devour each new chapter I uploaded. I realized then that Rose of Anzio had the potential to be read by a much wider audience. I started looking into publication options. Immediately, I learned two things. First, by posting the chapters on a public forum online, Rose of Anzio was considered already published, and no traditional publisher would accept a manuscript that had lost its “first publishing right”. Secondly, I can publish the story myself on Amazon.

 

Choosing to publish the story myself was thus a no-brainer. I had another career and wasn't aspiring to be a writer; endorsement from traditional publishers and literary prizes were far from my thoughts. My only wish was to get my story to readers, because it was fun!

 

I set about to learn all the ins and outs of publishing books on Amazon. By then, the indie writing market was already changing into a sophisticated industry. It was overwhelming to learn about cover design, formatting, promotion, sales and marketing strategies, and gaining readers. Luckily, the indie-writing community is very supportive. Experienced authors are forthcoming in sharing information with those who are just starting out. One consistent piece of advice they gave was that our books must be professionally produced. If not, the books will languish and never attract readers.

 

Following their advice, I found an editor, proofreaders, and a cover artist. I also retained a fellow British author to review my British-born female main character's dialogues to make sure she spoke accurate Queen’s English (I’m an American writer myself). My story had numerous battle scenes. I went online in search of expert advice. A military historian generously offered to be my consultant and helped me create and reviewed my battle scenes. Before my books went to print, I retained a second editor, a U.S. infantry veteran, to review my military and battle scenes to make sure the characters' actions, behaviors, dialogues, and the way the battles were written, were authentic and believable. 

 

Next, I devised a marketing plan. I implemented strategies I learned from the indie-pub community to build momentum for my book release, and to build and retain a fan base. I also had a bit of luck. My Candy Candy fanfic readers, who had been reading Rose of Anzio chapters online when I was writing the story, were eagerly waiting to have the print version in their hands. When the first book in the series came out, they not only bought copies, thus giving my book an initial boost, but also left glowing reviews of why they liked the book.

 

In retrospect, releasing my books on my own was the best thing I could have done. It turns out, many of my readers had lived through the war era. I had no idea this was the case when I first published. I assumed most of my readers would be in my own age group. The first time I received an email from a reader, it was from Marci, a lady who wanted to know when the second book in the Rose of Anzio series would be released. Marci said she and her best friend worked in Chicago in 1940. Rose of Anzio-Book One was set in 1940 Chicago. She told me she bought the eBook for herself, and a print copy for her best friend. 

 

My jaws dropped when I read Marci's email. I had to read it several times to confirm I was reading it right. Did she say she worked in Chicago in 1940? My book was released in 2016. I was shocked to learn that my novel resonated with readers who knew life in 1940s Chicago first-hand. I learned then that all my hard work and research had paid off.

 

Over time, I discovered that my books were bringing back memories to a generation of readers nostalgic for a world they once knew. In a Facebook group for WWII fiction readers and writers, a reader, Bonnie, once posted and recommended Rose of Anzio. I never interacted with Bonnie except to thank her for a post recommending my books to the group. When Bonnie finished reading my novel Eternal Flame, a Rose of Anzio spin-off, she left a one-sentence, positive review on Amazon. Three days later, a fellow group member told us Bonnie had passed away. I did not know until then that Bonnie had been terminally ill. The news filled me with emotions as I realized she had spent her last hours reading my book. She even left me a gift of a review. I could not tell her how grateful I was. I could only hope that my story gave her a little bit of comfort before she left.

 

This would not be the last time I had to bid farewell to a reader. Another reader who reached out to me was Betty Martin. Ms. Martin lived through the war era, and her husband was part of the Flying Tigers, the U.S. air force unit that fought in West China. Ms. Martin and kept in touch for two years, until her friend alerted me to her passing and told me Betty had been waiting for my next release. I was very saddened to hear the news, and I dedicated my next book to her.

 

When I think of my readers from the Greatest Generation, I’m glad that I had inadvertently fallen into self-publishing. If I had taken the traditional publishing route, I might have missed the chance to bring my stories with these readers. Even if an agent and a publisher had picked up my books, it would take on average two years for each book to be published. If I am able to give a few hours of comfort and escape to readers like Marci, Bonnie, and Betty, that would be reason enough for me to continue this course.

 

Being an indie author also gives me the freedom to write books without a proven sales record in the market. Currently, the WWII fiction genre is sorely lacking in novels with Asian main characters, and novels set in the Pacific. Traditional publishers are often averse to taking on books without data assuring sales. Unconstrained by such concerns, I wrote my series, Shanghai Story, to chronicle China's descent into WWII. The story features a Chinese male character. Novels with an Asian male lead is still a rarity today. I took the risk that traditional publishers are less willing to take, and am happy to discover that there is indeed a market demand.

 

For my current series, I am continuing to walk the path less traveled. In the WWII fiction genre, there are woefully few novels about Nisei (second-generation Japanese-Americans). Of the ones currently sold, the focus is on internment camps. I want to explore the Nisei experience beyond the confine of the camps. My new release, Last Night with Tokyo Rose, follows the journey of Tom Sakai, a Nisei growing up in an America increasingly hostile to those of Japanese ancestry. When he is stranded in Manila after Pearl Harbor, he would have to navigate the treacherous terrain of a world in which Japan and America are at war, and decide where his allegiance lies.

 

In the coming year, I plan to introduce to you books by some of the best indie authors in today’s publishing world. We will learn the interesting stories of how they came onto the path of indie-publishing, and their works which you would not want to miss.

I invite you all to visit my website at https://alexakang.com. You can also sign up for my newsletter at https://alexakang.com/newsletter

 

Julia Lovell's new translation of Monkey King: Journey to the West is a tour de force

 

STOP PRESS: FOR PAPER REPUBLIC'S EXCLUSIVE PODCAST WITH JULIA LOVELL TALKING ABOUT HER TRANSLATION, CLICK HERE

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Monkey King: Nicky Harman on a new translation of an old favourite.

Of all the posts I’ve written for Asian Books Blog, this one has to have been the most fun to write. Working out why a translation that’s really funny is funny… what’s not to like? To be truthful, I would have found it hard to write a more conventional review of Journey to the West. I have never read the original and although I acquired the three-volume translation by WJF Jenner many years ago, my second volume is suspiciously clean and I clearly never opened the third at all. But in any case, translator Julia Lovell, in her introduction, has done a much better job than I could ever do, in explaining where this epic novel came from, and how, over the centuries, it has been many things to many people.

Journey to the West was written (allegedly) by Wu Cheng’en in the sixteenth century and its hero, the sometimes eponymous Monkey, has enjoyed enduring popularity ever since. In addition to the stories in the Journey to the West, Monkey and his friends have featured in spin-off stories, cartoons, cartoon films, ballets, shadow plays, video games and much more, as you can see in the illustration above. 

Tripitaka, a pious Chinese monk, sets off to India in search of precious Buddhist sutras, in the company of bodyguards Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy. A brief extract from Lovell’s introduction gives a flavour of what is in store:

In the course of their travels, they encounter murderous Buddhists, perfidious Taoists, expanses of rotten persimmons, and monsters of all shapes and sizes (femmes fatales, rhinoceroses, iguanas, scorpions). They are serially captured, tied up, lacquered, sautéed, steamed, and impregnated, and come very close to being diced, boiled, liquidized, pickled, cured, and seduced by various fiends. Eventually, after eighty-one such calamities, the pilgrims reach Thunderclap Monastery, the stronghold of the Buddha in India, and are rewarded with armfuls of sutras and posts in the Buddha’s government of immortals.

Phew! It doesn't seem much of a reward for all their travails.

Julia Lovell’s new translation is about a quarter of the length of the original, including all the chapters that bookend it, and selected chapters in between. ‘The novel zings with physical and verbal humor,’ she writes, and the translation certainly does. Reading it made me wonder which of the comedic effects can be matched to the original text, and which arise from the translator’s creative use of English. Here is what Lovell says about the translation process:

Literary translators have two responsibilities: to the original text and to readers of the target language. Whichever languages translators work between, satisfying both constituencies can be difficult, but when working between two literary cultures as remote chronologically and geographically as sixteenth-century China and the twenty-first-century Anglophone world, the challenges are redoubtable. Sometimes, a translator has to sacrifice technical, linguistic fidelity to be true to the overall tone of a text.

 There is an abundance of humour in the original. Journey to the West is a fantasy novel, but the monsters and demons live in a recognisably bureaucratic society: Buddha has a government, sinecures are offered to Monkey, the demon king has ministers and flunkeys. In this exchange from the beginning of the novel, Monkey’s future is being decided (or so his divine superiors fondly imagine):

‘Majesty,’ the Spirit of Longevity from Venus ventured, ‘given that this monkey is a child of heaven and earth, of the sun and the moon, that he walks on two feet and has attained immortality, I propose that we treat him as we would a human. I humbly suggest you offer him an amnesty, summon him to Heaven and give him a government job. Once he’s inside the system he’ll have to behave. If he accepts, we can bamboozle him with sinecures; if he refuses, we can apprehend him. In any case, such a strategy will save us a military campaign and bring an unruly immortal to heel.’

 (It has to be said that Lovell has reduced this paragraph with an unapologetic panache that Monkey would have applauded. 105 words, as against Jenner’s 160 words for the same paragraph. But, hey, ‘bamboozle him with sinecures’ says it all! Here is the Chinese, for anyone who wants to have a go at it.

太白长庚星俯伏启奏道：’上圣三界中，凡有九窍 者，皆可修仙。奈此猴乃天地育成之体，日月孕就之身，他也顶天履地，服露餐霞； 今既修成仙道，有降龙伏虎之能，与人何以异哉?臣启陛下，可念生化之慈恩，降 一道招安圣旨，把他宣来上界，授他一个大小官职，与他籍名在箓，拘束此间；若 受天命，后再升赏；若违天命，就此擒拿。一则不动众劳师，二则收仙有道也。’ )

 And more divine bureaucracy: ‘Monkey told them what had happened in his dream and how he had persuaded the kings of the underworld to cross all their names off the ledger of death, at which news his subjects kowtowed with ecstatic gratitude. And from that point on, most mountain monkeys never got old, for the Underworld no longer had their names and addresses. … 

Precisely what is in the Chinese (自此，山猴多有不老者，以阴司无名故也), just with ‘and addresses’ added.

 Journey to the West uses a judicious mixture of register (and bathos), both in the original and in the translation. Here is Monkey being (unusually for him) respectful and formal – and the Patriarch cutting to the chase:

‘Monkey was overcome with regret. ‘I have been away from home for twenty years. Though I yearn to see my former subjects again, I hate to leave you before I have repaid your kindness to me.’ ‘Forget it,’ said the Patriarch. ‘Just don’t drag me into any of your messes.’ 

Which happens to be exactly what the original says: ‘ 祖师道：’…你只是不惹祸不牵带我就罢了！’

 On the other hand, quite a lot of the comedy in Lovell’s translation exploits the comic potential of English, rather than that of the Chinese. Monkey muses and fulminates. Tripitaka needles and wheedles, when he’s not blubbing in terror. The monkeys shriek and chatter. There are delicious dashes of alliteration. In chapter 15, Monkey calls the horse-eating dragon a ‘Lawless loach!’ Alliteration does not work in the same way in Chinese, so this is the translator’s voice, but entirely in the spirit of the original.

 I was particularly taken with the anachronisms[1]. They are superlatively funny. I was hard-put to choose from so many examples but here is a sample:

 ‘Lucky Monkey!’ The crowd of disciples giggled. ‘If you master this, you can get a job as an express courier. You’ll always be able to make a living.’ (This is actually only a small departure from the original, which has the job as an army or government messenger).

‘Once Monkey had explained his latest marvel, the crowd of monkeys spent the rest of the day playing with their new toys.’

‘Heaven runs a cashless economy.’ And so on…

Sometimes, the Dragon and Monkey sound like Jeeves and Wooster -- not entirely contemporary but instantly recognisable:

‘Now that I’ve adopted this magic staff, I feel rather under-dressed. If you could rustle up some armor to go with it, I’d be much obliged.’

‘I’m most dreadfully sorry, but I don’t have anything suitable.’

‘I don’t want to be a bother to someone else. I’ll sit it out here till you come up with the goods.’

‘I suggest you try another ocean. You might have more luck there.’

Elsewhere, the dialogue is bang up-to-date: 

‘Are you forgetting who rescued you from that stone casket beneath the Mountain of Two Frontiers? You owe me, Monkey! Get me something to eat before this pestilential mountain finishes me off.’

And here are Monkey and Pigsy as the sparring duo:

Witnessing this at a distance, Tripitaka was speechless with horror. ‘Oh, well-played, Monkey!’ chortled Pigsy. ‘Three murders and it’s not even lunchtime.’

Julia Lovell’s translation is a delight and a tour de force. I hope that in taking a translator’s tweezers to it, I have managed to convey some of my admiration for its creativity and joie de vivre.

 If you want to read around the subject, here are some more links to entertain you:

Minjie Chen in Monkey Craze! examines iterations of Monkey in the modern period.

A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi, by Sean Bye looks at the art of changing connotations and registers in translation

And on the journey by the real Xuanzang/Tripitaka, Chasing The Monk's Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang, by Mishi Saran, reviewed on Asian Books Blog here

 

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[1] A useful definition: words and phrases that are felt as anachronisms are those that are more strikingly modern than the other …. language around them. 

The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda - A Modern Japanese Crime Novel

The Silent Dead is a Japanese crime novel by Tetsuya Honda and the first installment of the Reiko Himekawa series. It offers a glimpse into Japanese law enforcement, which is a huge blind spot to many Westerners. It also shines a light on corruption, sexism, and perversion that festers underneath the surface of Japanese culture, which is a blind spot to many Japanese themselves.

Contemporary Voices: Elaine Chiew Chats with Jenny Bhatt, Author of Each of Us Killers

 

Photo Credit: Praveen Ahuja

Bio:

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, book critic, and the host of the Desi Books podcast. Her debut story collection, Each of Us Killers, was out Sep 2020 with 7.13 Books. Her literary translation, Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, was out Oct 2020 with HarperCollins India. She lives in the Dallas, Texas area and teaches fiction at Writing Workshops Dallas.

Synopsis:

Stories woven at the intersection of labor and our emotional lives. Set in the American Midwest, England, and India, the stories in Each of Us Killers are about people trying to realize their dreams and aspirations through their professions. Whether they are chasing money, power, recognition, love, or simply trying to make a decent living, their hunger is as intense as any grand love affair. Straddling the fault lines of class, caste, gender, nationality, globalization, and more, they go against sociocultural norms despite challenges and indignities until singular moments of quiet devastation turn the worlds of these characters—auto-wallah, housemaid, street vendor, journalist, architect, baker, engineer, saree shop employee, professor, yoga instructor, bartender, and more—upside down.

Cover design: Harshad Marathe

Find your fix: Portals to new Asian poetry in 2021

Every literary community depends on a constellation of magazines, blogs, journals and reviews that help bring writers closer to their readers. Beyond providing unpublished authors with feedback and recognition, they spark conversations about and around books, fostering thoughtful engagement with writers and their work. In recent years, we’ve welcomed a plethora of outlets that publish and engage with new voices from across the wider ‘Asian’ community. What better way to start 2021 than with a quick survey of these up-and-coming platforms?

With some exceptions, I’ll be focusing on publications that have launched within the last five years, and publish new poetry – though almost all of them also publish fantastic work in other genres. Of course, we shouldn’t forget stalwarts like the Hong Kong-based Cha, which just last year published a powerful retrospective on ‘Tiananmen Thirty Years On’; or Vancouver-based Ricepaper, which began in 1994 as a newsletter at the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop. The following titles simply represent the latest sampling of new publishing initiatives that deserve a wider audience.  

Some of the publications featured below

LI JUAN. Nicky Harman on a writer of many hues

I first came across Li Juan in 2016, when she featured in the Paper Republic post for LitHub online magazine, entitled ‘Ten Chinese Women whose Works should be Translated’. Serendipitously, two of her autobiographical accounts of life in Xinjiang have come out in translation within a week of each other:

Winter Pasture, translated by Jack Hargreaves and Yan Yan (Astra Books, 2021); and 

Distant Sunflower Fields, translated by Christopher Payne (Sinoist Books, 2021)

Winter Pasture

Li Juan is a Han Chinese, born in Xinjiang and brought up in her parents’ hometown in Sichuan. Thereafter she moved back to wide, open spaces of Xinjiang and made it her home. The ideal person to spend a winter living with a nomadic Kazakh family in China’s Altai region, and then write a book about it, one would think. But from the start, the journey (made in 2010) which is the subject of this book, is not a simple endeavour. She struggles to find a host family who will take her along. Firstly, the Kazakhs regard her as an oddity: she is much too old to be unmarried and and does not do what they regard as work. Then there is the language barrier: she makes some attempt to improve her grasp of the Kazakh language, but has about as little success as they do with speaking Chinese. Some younger nomad couples are bilingual but, she tells us wryly, she is wary of sharing a cramped winter home with a pair of young lovebirds.

Li Juan is disarmingly self-deprecating, and that is part of the charm of this book. She reveals how hard she found it to endure the sub-zero temperatures and conditions so spartan that the only water to be had is snow-melt. Chinese female travellers have until recently been a rarity, and Li Juan has often been compared to a famous predecessor, Sanmao, whose wanderings in the 1970s have just appeared in English as Tales of the Sahara. The comparison seems to me highly ironic: Sanmao was writing about a truly foreign country, the Western Sahara. Xinjiang is part of the People’s Republic of China (although the nomadic way of life is a world away from the China inhabited by most Han Chinese). Sanmao was a born wanderer, Li Juan, by contrast, declares herself a reluctant traveller who much prefers to stay home. But perhaps they do have something in common: both women settled into communities where they are outsiders looking in. No one is more keenly aware of this than Li Juan. She admires the Chinese Kazakh writer Yerkex Hurmanbek who, she says: ‘taught me that I am a Han Chinese describing an alien environment, and no matter how close I am, I’ll always be a bystander because I’m not the same as them.’

During this winter trip, her hosts and their way of life continue to puzzle her. On one occasion, she is caught by strangers with her pants down – literally – while mending a rip in them. ‘What happens when these people who just barge into people’s homes encounter an even more awkward scene?’ she muses.

Li Juan is not just an outsider to the Kazakhs. She remains on the margins of the Chinese literary scene, seldom leaving her home to join the festival or speaking circuit. She has considerable standing among her contemporaries, however. The eminent writer Wang Anyi comments: ‘Her writing is instantly recognizable. It inhabits a world which is vast and lonely, and where time is endless. Humans have become tiny things that occur almost incidentally.’

Still, those tiny humans are subjected to close scrutiny. Her host, Cuma, drinks too much and is a bully, but Li Juan respects his intelligence. Ironically, it transpires that as she spends her time observing him and trying to work him out, he is doing the same with her: ‘It was because he assumed that the only reason I had come to the winter pasture was to learn to herd.’  He is astonished at her apparent contentment where he is bored and frustrated. ‘Always walking here and there, what are you doing?’ ‘Playing.’ ‘How is walking here and there playing?’ ‘I’m playing a game of “walking here and there”. Unable to understand, he simply smirked.’

Li Juan is modest about her literary ambitions. Largely self-taught (her family could not afford to send her to university), she is frank about why she began to write:  ‘It was the only thing I was good at. You have to earn a living somehow.’ The editor and arts curator Ou Ning, in an extended interview with Li Juan, describes her writing as ‘genuine and sincere.’ She does not disagree, in fact she adds: ‘Hurmanbek gets it absolutely right in her writings … she’s taught me the importance of honesty and genuineness.’

I do not doubt that Li Juan is sincere but it is a sophisticated kind of sincerity. Her writing comes in many hues – she moves deftly from the lyrical to tongue-in-cheek humour to sheer joy. She is always sharply observant, and she can occasionally be tender.

Here she writes about the power of the landscape: ‘Clouds metamorphosed before our eyes, drifting from east to west. The endless sky, the boundless earth, left us speechless. Compared to the sense of loneliness the moment conjured, our weariness seemed trivial.’

Here, a deadpan description of the delights of food: ‘The only thing on my mind is that day-old, half-golden, half-tan piece of nan sitting alone on the kitchen counter. That is my one and only! That is my rock-solid truth, the thing that keeps me pondering, even in my sleep—why hasn’t it been eaten yet? Give it another day, it’ll get even harder! …If, when you reach for a piece of nan, you happen to pick one that is only two days old (the rest are all three days old!), it’s even more exciting than winning five bucks at the lottery.’ By this time we, the readers, have shared with her the harshness of life outside their burrow-home, so we understand perfectly the intense sensations of mealtimes.

And here is a poignant vignette: ‘Inside the dark burrow, a single shaft of light beamed through the only window. The sight of Rahmethan planting little kisses on the baby’s bottom; the sight of brother and sister discussing the changing of the baby’s diaper; son holding on to father as he cuts strips of cowhide, the two slipping in and out of song together; the little girl Nurgün squatting with dripping-wet hair beside the stove, washing clothes . . . these scenes moved me immensely. But I didn’t dare to photograph them for fear of disturbing them.’

Jack Hargreaves and Yan Yan have written an exemplary Translators’ Foreword, giving background information and locating the journey. They have also done a fine job of rendering Li Juan’s many voices into English, the meditative, the humorous, and the unflinching and matter-of-fact. In Winter Pasture, Li Juan has written something more engrossing and more thought-provoking than a simple travelogue. Between them, author and translators have given us a fascinating read.

Distant Sunflower Fields, translated by Christopher Payne (Sinoist Books, 2021)

This is an account of a season Li Juan spends farming with her mother and stepfather, two years before she travels with the Kazakhs. As it opens, she is looking after her grandmother until the doughty old woman dies at 96; after which, she returns home to help with a new project, growing sunflowers. As in Winter Pasture, Li Juan is droll, unsentimental, clear-eyed and occasionally painfully introspective. Also happily unmarried, something the neighbours never get used to.  She writes engagingly about the work (back-breaking) and daily life (spartan), as well their skirmishes with pests, pets and rival farmers, but it is her portraits of the three women (author, mother and grandmother) and their relationships that I found most impressive.

If anything, Sunflowers has even less of a narrative thread and context than Winter Pasture. We only discover the year, 2008, halfway through, and we are almost at the end of the book before Li Juan tells us that her mother speaks Kazakh and, in a rare leisure moment, gleans some spicy gossip from the local women. She gives almost no background information about how and when these impoverished Han Chinese families moved to Xinjiang and how their lives are interwoven with those of the nomadic Kazakhs, industrial workers, and government functionaries. We are simply there, seeing Li Juan’s life in close-up, so to speak. So everything depends on her ability to draw us in, to immerse us in her life and her feelings.

And we are drawn in. There is her pain: Li Juan is distressed about her inability to settle (‘I’m an expert at leaving,’ she writes) and about her difficulties in communicating with her mother. There is her bitterness about the despoiling of the land, ‘I have seen dead land. I mean, really dead – the surface was hard and blanched white. [The fields] were filled with the dead and decaying corpses of so many sunflower seeds from so many years before. The unrelenting sun had bleached them as well. I figured this was on account of the overuse of fertilisers, the unre­liable irrigation, the alkalisation of the soil, the overextension of lost and abandoned land.’

She draws us in with her humour, too. Li Juan’s mother is quite a character: she’s a biker who is as happy off-road as on tarmac; she rescues some almost naked hens and sews costumes to keep them from freezing until their feathers grow back; oh, and how could I forget this – she actually does the farm work naked because it is so hot in summer.

More than that, Sunflowers is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. I was particularly taken with their guard-dog who is an incorrigible shoe thief. ‘Once people began to realise that Chouchou was responsible for their missing footwear, we'd have visitors every few days, notice­ably barefoot, in search of their shoes. We'd direct them to the pile in the back and then they'd begin sifting through as though they were at some police station with a lost-and-found box in front of them. Chouchou would never be far off either. Usually, he'd watch them look for the shoes, basking in the sunlight, wagging his tail as they did so, assuming a posture of feigned indifference. Not only did Chouchou enjoy pilfering other peoples’ shoes and bringing them home with him, he was also quite fond of taking our shoes and depositing them at our neighbours’ places. It was a rather perplexing hobby to say the least.’

I was relieved to read that by the end of their season’s hard labour, the family have harvested twenty tonnes of sunflower seeds. As they wait for the bags of seeds to be collected, Li Juan describes a scene of rare tranquility, ‘The final bit of work in the sunflower fields had ended, and now all we had to do was wait for the day they were to be sold. Since there was nothing else to do, each evening after dinner, the whole family would go out for a walk. And I do mean everyone – the cat, Saihu [dog], even the braver rabbits would accompany us. Chou­chou, too, who always loved joining in the fun, wouldn’t miss out either, although his fear of the cat kept him some distance behind. There were also some chickens who tagged along, those that hadn't already settled down in their coop for the night. At first, there'd be a few, but they’d gradually turn and head back. Chickens, after all, had a hard time seeing in the dark…Mum would turn and pick up the few that still remained and carry them in her arms.’