Water Ink

Mariella Frostrup asked in her Open Book programme on BBC Radio 4 whether there is a Chinese Jane Austen, whose work a listener’s fourteen years old daughter could enjoy. There are several authors instantly pop into the mind. Eileen Chang (张爱玲), whose short story Lust, Caution on which Ang Lee’s film is based, is the obvious candidate. But I think her work is often too cold. Her sharp words could coolly pick up the shortcoming of the protagonists piece by piece. Her view of the relationship is perhaps too cynical for a fourteen years old. Qiong Yao (琼瑶), the Taiwanese female author published several dozens of romantic novels in the seventies, many of them have since been adapted into films and TV series. Many will regard her work too superficial and melodramatic though. One contemporary author is Hong Kong’s Yi Shu (亦舒). Her stories rarely happen outside the world of rich and beautiful, but the wittiness is very enjoyable. Zhang Xiaoxian (张小娴), another female writer from Hong Kong, is many people’s favourite romantic novelist.

The problem is novel had not been a highly regarded form of art until the turn of twenty century. In the first half of the last century, when the country suffered never ending civil wars and foreign invasion, writers were often urged to come up with patriotic novels instead of romantic ones. Added into this is the less freedom women enjoyed than their counterparts in the west in this period. So it’s no surprise that there was no Jane Austen kind of figure in early Chinese literature.

But if you don’t mind the gender, Lin Yutang’s (林语堂) Moment in Peking (京华烟云), about a big family in early twenty century Peking (Beijing) is a good read, and it was written in English by the author.

For English readers, some of Eileen Chang’s novels have been translated into English, like Lust, Caution (色戒), Love in the Fallen City (倾城之恋), The Rouge of North (怨女), Written on Water (流言). She also wrote in English such as the novel The Rice Sprout Song. I haven’t seen any English translation of Qiong Yao, Yi Shu, and Zhang Xiaoxian’s novels.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a collection of ten short stories written by the Chinese author Yiyun Li. The sharp observation of human relationships, the sometimes punchy, sometimes minimalistic dialogs, as well as the warmth and empathy underneath, all make the reading very enjoyable.

Yiyun Li is at her best conveying the strange sense of alienation and liberation. In the two stories I like the most, Extra and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the protagonists were all thrown into an unfamiliar situation. Unable to communicate with or without the language barrier, but still trying to understand, the characters at end all manage to find their way out, reaching some kind of inner peace and freedom while the outside world remains largely indifferent and incomprehensible.

What strikes me most in those stories is the freedom gained by using a new language. Being able to, or being forced to use a new language, looks to have the unexpected effect of making one be freed from the inhibitory restraint of the mother tongue, instead of just providing the possibility of make yourself understandable. The author herself once said that she feels using English to write gives her the freedom to better express herself. In A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, we witness Mr Shi’s daughter’s transformation from a distant, silent figure into a vivid, laughing, animated person once she’s on the phone, speaking English. We, as Mr Shi, are astonished.

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It is a bit strange to find Rob Gifford’s China Road in the travel section of my local bookshop. Route 312, where the author traveled from end to end, is not exact your typical tourist route. Nor is it associated with some significant historical events, for example, the Long March – which has become popular lately. However, Route 312 does connect Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city of China, to Urumqi, the provincial capital of the most remote part of Northwest China, two very different social and natural landscapes indeed.

Rob Gifford is not a normal tourist or explorer either. He’s been living in China for many years as a journalist working for BBC and American public service radio network NPR. This trip, which he did just before leaving China for a new job in London, not only reveals a society of huge diversity which is undergoing rapid social and economic changes, but also summaries the author’s understanding of Chinese people, culture and history. The contrasts in terms of cultural and economic development neatly reflect on the way Gifford travels, by train, car, taxi, imported 4×4 and overloaded truck. In one instance, the car he traveled on was caught by police for speeding, resulted in a strange encounter with the law enforcement and hot discussion of English Premier League.

You would be disappointed if you are looking for tourist attraction in the book. What the author attempts to do, however, is to inject his insight of Chinese society into the travel story, which really distinguishes this book from other similar travel logs. The subtitle gives it away: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power. It’s combination of travel writing and commentary of culture and history. The down side of this approach is that the author could not write about one issue for too long, because the journey has to move on. Unlike another recently published book about present time China, Duncan Hewitt’s Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China, the social observation in China Road does look scattered sometimes.

This is a funny and insightful book. An enjoyable read.

In the introduction of his new book Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China (Chatto and Windus), Duncan Hewitt wrote that when he sat at the cafe of Shanghai IKEA, he can see cars and trucks were rushing around outside the window in the three level elevated roads which also tangled with a light weight train rail. When I was reading this, I was sitting beside a window in a quiet corner of one of the large Waterstone’s in Edinburgh. Outside the window is the cobbled back street, where a pigeon was fighting hopelessly against a seagull for some leftover chips. Incidently, Edinburgh is where Hewitt’s journey started, as one of the students learning Chinese in Edinburgh University who were about setting foot in China in late 80s.

An often heard complaint among the youngests who came to the UK from China is that this place is just a bit dull. People can cite me many things they used to do in China, eating out at a newly opened restaurant, karaoke at a new KTV, or exchanging some latest American tv series are just the common ones. There seems to be endless supplies of new ways of consuming and entertaining. Things are moving rather fast there.

This fits well what Hewitt said, that it almost like the 60 years of post war development in the West has been compressed into 20 years in China. BBC’s Andrew Marr, in his History of Modern Britain, describes the make over of Birmingham in the 60s - the old Birmingham almost completely disappeared while people can’t wait to see a New Britain. Imagine that in a much bigger scale, repeated every five years. That’s what’s happening in China.

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BBC Radio 4 last week broadcasted two programs about China and Chinese. Anna Chen tracked the lives of early Chinese migrants in the UK in her 10-part series Chinese in Britain, while Duncan Hewitt read his new book Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China in Book of the Week program. The two programs provide sharp contrast: one is about how the early settlers from China survived and adopted to an alien land, the another is about how the young and old at the present time struggled and prospered when the old rules and value gone out of the window. And yet, both programs give some clues of how Chinese deal with changes, our fondness of “progress” and embrace of the “new”.

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A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
by Xiaolu Guo
I have to admit I didn’t read the whole book. I borrowed a copy from my friend but only had enough time to have a quick glance. I read the beginning when the protagonist Zhuang Xiaoqiao is on a plane to the UK, some bits in the middle, including an excerpt appeared on The Times, and the last several pages. So this is not a review, rather my impression on this book.

The plot is simple. Zhuang Xiaoqiao, a young woman comes to the UK to study English, with little knowledge of the country, and the language. She meets an artist in London. They becomes lovers and she moves into his flat in the rough side of London. She explores the culture, language, and sex through him. She feels increasingly lost when she knows better about the English (in the broad sense) and decides to go back to China. The circle ends. The story is narrated solely from the Zhuang Xiaoqiao’s point of view, using a dictionary-like structure, hence the book title.

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