The BestChineseFictionYou’ve Never

Read

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Paper Republic is a website run by translators of Chineseliterature located all over the world. We have compiledthis package of books we feel worthy of translation in for-eign languages with an eye both to diversity of subject mat-ter, and consistent quality.All books in this package have been included with theknowledge and consent of their authors. Substantial trans-lation samples for each book are available for downloadfrom paper-republic.org. You can contact us via thewebsite, or email us at info@paper-republic.org.This package was created using funds from the Arts Coun-cil England.

ContentsHappy ‡ Jia Pingwa 1

Abandoned Capital ‡ Jia Pingwa 4

Screwed ‡ Han Dong 6

Truth and Variations ‡ Li Er 8

Northern Girls ‡ Sheng Keyi 11

Common Sense ‡ Leung Man-Tao 13

Ball Lightning ‡ Liu Cixin 15

Happy ‡ Jia Pingwa

Happy, by Jia Pingwa

2007Writer’s Publishing House

320pp

Jia PingwaJia Pingwa is the last of China’s contemporary

literary greats to be discovered in English. His in-fluence and reputation within China is on par withthat of Mo Yan, Yu Hua and Su Tong: he is a regularrecipient of most of the country’s top prizes for liter-

ature, and each of his books is eagerly anticipated byreaders, critics and journalists. Though the Englishtranslation of his novel Turbulence won the PegasusPrize for Literature in 1991, he is better known inother languages, particularly French.

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Happy ‡ Jia Pingwa

Jia Pingwa’s oeuvre is extensive and varied, in-cluding novels, novellas, short stories and essays.Both he and his writing are identified with China’scountryside–not the bleak scrabble of Great LeapForward peasantry, but the bloody, mythic, richly-imagined roots of China’s rural civilization. Hissubjects range from the effects of modernizationon Chinese society (Ruined Capital), to the ancientagrarian sensibilities at the heart of Chinese culture(Qin Opera), to the tragedies and absurdities of ur-banization (Happy). The majority of Jia’s work is setin and around Xi’an, once the capital of China’s fa-bled Tang dynasty, now something of a backwater.His use of Xi’an and its surrounding countryside as asetting in which to examine China’s rural/urban di-vide gives his works a depth and relevance beyondthe spectacle of development limited to Beijing andShanghai.

HappyHappy begins as Liu Hawa, aka ‘Happy’, tries tosmuggle the body of his friend Wufu home on thetrain. Happy and Wufu are peasants who came toXi’an from the countryside in search of a betterlife, and from the opening chapter the story back-tracks to their arrival in the city and their early daysas trash collectors, roam the streets of the modernmetropolis, gawp at fancy hotels and even fancier

women, dreaming of the day when they might risehigh enough in the ranks of the trash-collecting hier-archy to become “trash kings”. Wufu and Happy arenot equally ambitious, however–Happy is a dreamer,prone to ferociously optimistic flights of fancy,whose sole ambition is to become a “city man” (andwho believes that his sale of a kidney to a Xi’an resi-dent has secured him that right). Wufu, on the otherhand, has humbler aspirations, and can’t shake thefeeling that he was never meant to leave behind thesimple pleasures of village life.

Jia Pingwa’s latest novel Happy is a departurefrom his signature lyric, semi-mythic style. The ma-jority of the work consists of the episodic adventuresof Happy and Wufu as they navigate their bafflingnew home, encountering a wide cast of charactersboth cruel and kind, wooing women far above theirstatus and doing battle with corruption and bureau-cracy. While the story as a whole tends towards thetragic, individual chapters are narrated in a spare,comedic style, exhibiting Jia’s mastery of scene andcharacter, and disguising a penetrating critique ofsocial transformation as a rollicking picaresque.

The deep-seated spiritual anxiety caused byChina’s transformation into an urban society hasbeen a common theme in Chinese literature of thepast few decades, but few writers can match Jia (whocontinues, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to identifyhimself as a peasant) for insight and perspective. In

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Happy ‡ Jia Pingwa

the character of Happy the author has concentratedall the ambitions, misconceptions, vanity, earnest-ness, pride and principle that describe the psychol-ogy of China’s newest urban population.

A film version of Happy, directed by Ah Gan(Ghosts, 2002), and starring Guo Tao (Crazy Stone)was released in February, 2009.

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Abandoned Capital ‡ Jia Pingwa

Abandoned Capital, by Jia Pingwa

1994Writer’s Publishing House

300pp

Please see Jia Pingwa’s author profile on page 1.

Abandoned CapitalThe book that gained Jia Pingwa his reputation asa Chinese literary giant, Abandoned Capital createdenormous controversy upon its publication in 1994,

resulting in a soft ban that lasted until the publi-cation of a new edition in 2009. Though the con-troversy centered around (relatively harmless) sexualcontent, creating a reputation for lasciviousness thatunfortunately persists today, it is not for the naughtybits that this novel is considered one of the mas-terpieces of modern Chinese literature. The char-

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Abandoned Capital ‡ Jia Pingwa

acters of Zhuang Zhidie, the literary lion of Xi’an,and Zhou Min, the young challenger from the coun-tryside, have become bywords in the discussion ofChinese culture and its discontents, and the book’srichly textured narrative style has served as a modelfor many authors who came after.

Though written in the 1990s, Abandoned Capitalis more in company with European literature of the19th century: the social and psychological tapestry

of George Eliot, the dense realism of Thomas Mann.Its closest correspondence might be to Stendahl’sRouge et Noir: the story of an idealistic youngman’s journey to the center of culture and learning,where he finds not the elegance and elevation he haddreamed of, but instead a slightly sordid collectionof hypocrites and libertines basking in the fadingglow of an earlier golden age.

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Screwed ‡ Han Dong

Screwed, by Han Dong

January 2010Shaanxi Normal University Press

250pp

Han DongBorn 17 May, 1961 in Nanjing. Han Dong’s par-

ents were banished to the countryside during theCultural Revolution, taking him with them. Follow-ing the Cultural Revolution he studied western phi-losophy, and became a full-time writer in 1993.

Han Dong has been well-known since the 1980s

as one of China’s most important avant-garde po-ets, and is now increasingly influential as an essay-ist, short story writer and novelist. He is stead-fastly opposed to the Party-controlled writing “es-tablishment” and the wholesale “commercialization”of contemporary literature. His deceptively simple,

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Screwed ‡ Han Dong

subtle style of writing has acquired a cult followingamong young Chinese writers and readers.

His chief works include collections of poetry, es-says, short stories and novellas, and four full-lengthnovels. Among these, Banished! won the indepen-dent ‘Chinese Language Media Novel Prize’ in 2003.Its English translation, by Nicky Harman, was pub-lished by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2008 andwas long-listed for the Man Asia Literary Prize thatyear.

Screwed!A Chinese Midnight’s Children? A post-modern takeon Metamorphosis? There are many resonances inHan Dong’s fourth novel, Screwed!, yet this is awholly original work.

In 1968, Xiaofei, along with millions of otherhigh school students, is sent on Chairman Mao Ze-dong’s orders to settle in remote villages. To relievethe monotony of their new country life, he and hisfriends start rumours that they have been screwingthe villagers’ only ox, Girlie. The joke goes wrongwhen Girlie falls sick, and the blame is pinned on Xi-aofei. He is brutally interrogated and found guilty ofsabotaging production by raping the animal. For thisoffence, he faces execution. Coincidentally, that daythere is a fight in a village compound shared by twobrothers and their families. The younger brother isaccidentally killed. Before the death can be officially

reported, some of the villagers concoct a plan: toinstall the hapless Xiaofei as a substitute husband.Xiaofei is released and guided through pitch dark-ness to the widow, who eventually succeeds in se-ducing and “marrying” him. The next morning, thebrother’s corpse is discovered in the river, and hur-riedly identified as that of Xiaofei. Xiaofei assumesthe identity of the dead brother, enabling the elderbrother to escape justice.

Six years pass with Xiaofei in semi-hiding, andMao’s policy of sending all high school students tothe countryside is reversed. But to return to Nan-jing and his former life, Xiaofei needs documentswhich, of course, can’t be obtained since he has beendeclared dead. He tracks down his former perse-cutor, the sinister Party official, Wang, who bullieshim into confessing to the subterfuge. The survivingbrother is then finally arrested for murder…

Han Dong is well-read in contemporary West-ern literature, citing Kafka, Murakami, Kundera andGarcia Marquez as influences, yet his is a whollyoriginal voice. In Screwed!, Han Dong’s experimentswith the novel form have produced a distinctive andhighly readable narrative. The story moves with as-surance between the credible and the incredible, re-alism and fantasy, and builds suspense right up tothe last page. Like much of Han’s previous work,Screwed! is bitingly satirical, yet also softened by af-fectionate, even lyrical descriptions of country life.

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Truth and Variations ‡ Li Er

Truth and Variations, by Li Er

January 2002People’s Literature Publishing

House303pp

Li ErNovelist and short story writer Li Er was born

1966 in Henan Province. Despite his modest claimthat he is “not very prolific”, he has publishedfive story collections, two novels and approximately50 novellas and short stories–most within the last

decade. His work appears regularly in most majormainland literary journals. Although Li Er is stillrelatively unknown outside of China, he is widely re-spected in Chinese literary circles and has acquireda passionate–one might even say rabid–fan base of

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Truth and Variations ‡ Li Er

highly literate and intellectual readers. He has alsoattracted a great deal of attention among literarycritics for his inter-textual and stylistic experiments.

Truth and VariationsWho once was me, the mirrored-man…

whose was my reflected life?Was I the red rose growing in the

darknessor the blue flame flickering in the

breeze?Who warned me from the shadows,

who stepped forward from the crowd?Who smashed the mirror into shards

and made a multitude of me?

Li Er’s genre-breaking historical novel Truthand Variations is often cited as one of the mostoriginal works in contemporary Chinese literature.Comprised of faux-historical documents, inventedarchival materials, snippets of poetry and pseudo-interviews spanning the Chinese civil war, Com-munist Revolution, Cultural Revolution and presentday, the book recounts the search for the “historicaltruth” (a very fluid concept, according to the author)about the life and death of its fictional protagonist,the revolutionary poet Hu Man.

A trio of biased and unreliable narrators—a doc-tor, a political prisoner and a judge—spin a com-

pelling mystery about Hu Man, who was reportedlykilled in a raid by soldiers of the Japanese ImperialArmy. But by 1942, rumours begin to surface thatHu Man may have escaped the raid, turned his backon politics and revolution, and gone into hiding ina remote mountain region. These rumours are po-tentially embarrassing for the Chinese CommunistParty, because they directly contradict the myth ofHu Man as an heroic revolutionary martyr. Partyleaders decide to release Hu Man’s best friend, ac-cused Trotskyite Dr. Bai, from prison and send himto track down, and perhaps eliminate, Hu Man. Thissets in motion a series of events that will be dis-puted, discussed, dissembled and denied by gener-ations of observers for years to come…

Truth and Variations is that rarest of reads: abig, ambitious, high-stakes novel that manages to beboth illuminating and entertaining, heart-breakingand hysterically funny, boldly experimental and yetnever gimmicky. In this outstanding debut, Li Erhas earned his place as one of China’s finest novel-ists: a humanist, satirist, literary craftsman, relent-less chronicler and keen-eyed observer from whomwe should expect great things.

“Li Er’s Truth and Variations is a reflectionon the tragedy of the death of the indi-vidual in the course of modern revolu-tion.”

Zhang Qinghua, Professor of Modern and Contem-

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Truth and Variations ‡ Li Er

porary Chinese Literature, Beijing Normal University(author of China’s Contemporary Avant-garde Liter-ary Movement).

“I reserve an honorary mention for LiEr, the young Henan novelist […] Inhis usual style, he plays all kinds ofironic stylistic games on a deadly seri-ous theme. The narrative is carried bythree different persons in a kind of par-tially overlapping relay, in the mannerof Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quar-tet. But the theme that careful read-

ers could find in the end, when the truehero of the novel finally lets himselfbe seen, is a revolutionary intellectualtired of rhetoric and of power struggles.I am personally very impressed by thenovelist’s profound sense of historicity,something the ‘historiographical’ Chi-nese culture can now hardly claim topossess.”

Henry Y.H. Zhao,“The river fans out: Chinese fic-tion since the late 1970s”, published in European Re-view, Vol. 11, No. 2, 193–208 (2003).

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Northern Girls ‡ Sheng Keyi

Northern Girls, by Sheng Keyi

2004Changjiang Wenyi Publishing

House248pp

Sheng KeyiChina’s most prominent young female writer,

Sheng Keyi falls between the early waves of “femi-nist” Chinese authors (such as Wang Anyi and BingXin), and the youngest crop of writers in their twen-ties (eg Chun Sue and Zhang Yueran). Sheng Keyi

has benefited from being caught between genera-tions: she is free to build upon new modes of fic-tion pioneered by older writers–interiority, femininepsychology–while remaining unafflicted by the self-regard and childish solipsism of the younger. Her

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Northern Girls ‡ Sheng Keyi

influences are immensely varied: as a young womanshe moved from a small town in Hunan to the south-ern Chinese city of Shenzhen to look for work, andher observations of the ad hoc creation of that mas-sive new metropolis, and the formation of its newmigrant societies, made a deep impression on her.She is also a voracious reader, both of translated for-eign literature and Chinese traditional works, and asa result is one of the most versatile experimenters instyle and voice in China today. Though her writingtends to begin with female characters and themesshe is comfortable with a wide range of subject mat-ter, and is known primarily for her keen and unsen-timental appraisals of psychological and social sub-tleties.

Since she began writing fiction in 2002, Shenghas published five novels, one collection of non-fiction, and two collections of short stories. She isthe recipient of the first Chinese Literature MediaPrize along with many other awards, and currentlylives in Shenzhen, where she writes full time.

Northern GirlsSheng Keyi’s first full-length novel, Northern Girlsis drawn from her experiences as a job-seeking mi-grant in the early 1990s. Its main character, Hong,is no different from the thousands of other coun-try girls who are moving to Shenzhen to seek work,with one exception: she has an extraordinarily full

bosom. She finds herself caught up in the chaos ofShenzhen, a city that hardly existed ten years previ-ously, where the mad rush of economic growth hasdestabilized moral norms and shredded the fabric ofsociety. With hardly a thought in her head but tomake her way in the world, she discovers that herbody has already opened some doors and closed oth-ers, shaping her fate before she’s even had a chanceto gain her footing.

After arriving in Shenzhen Hong and her frienddrift at the edges of society, working in hair salons,shops, factories and hotels, owning absolutely noth-ing in the world but their labor and their bodies. Asmigrant worker girls they are doomed to be scornedby local women and humiliated by local men, but asHong’s companions slowly begin to turn down thepath of least resistance, Hong herself sticks to herown idiosyncratic principles, stubbornly insisting onher own brand of integrity, and the bosom that hascaused her so much grief becomes a symbol of herirrepressible vital force.

Written in a lively, raunchy style, Northern Girlsseems to mirror Hong’s own attitude towards life:a country girl’s nonchalance about sexuality, a mi-grant’s fascination with the strangeness of her sur-roundings, a survivor’s will to live. An excerpt fromNorthern Girls appeared in German translation inthe collection Neue Träume aus der Roten Kammer,published June 2009.

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Common Sense ‡ Leung Man-Tao

Common Sense, by Leung Man-Tao

2009Guangxi Normal University Press

367pp

Leung Man-TaoHong Kong’s special colonial past, as well as the

economic and political status it enjoys today, havegiven rise to a uniquely cosmopolitan culture whichis hard to imagine anywhere else in China. Le-ung Man-Tao, prolific current affairs writer and TV

commentator has grown from this environment intosomething of a cultural icon, and has succeeded inmaking a name for himself throughout the Chinese-speaking world.

Leung was born in 1970 in Hong Kong and ed-

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Common Sense ‡ Leung Man-Tao

ucated in Taiwan. He later returned to Hong Kongwhere he now combines writing and blogging withworking as media entrepreneur, lecturer, film criticand book reviewer, campaigner on AIDS and the en-vironment, and film producer.

China may have ‘opened up’ in the last 30 years,but comment on China is still heavily influenced byideology, whether it comes from the West or theEast. In this atmosphere, Leung’s incisive commen-tary comes as a breath of fresh air. He combinesa lively writing style with an uncommon breadthof knowledge, writing prolifically on topics rangingfrom the American presidential elections to racismwithin mainland China, from the plight of Chinesehuman rights lawyers to food culture.

Recent books include collections of interviews,personal reflections and current affairs articles.

Common SenseAn explicit homage to Thomas Paine’s book of thesame name, Common Sense represents a rare andrisky attempt to introduce real soul-searching intoChina’s cultural discourse. Merely scanning the ti-tles of the essays – “Saying Goodbye to ‘100 Years of

National Humiliation’”, “China Threat: What Ex-actly is it We’re Exporting”, “Voting: Not the Ex-pression of Popular Will, But the Execution of Pop-ular Will” – makes it obvious that Leung is not afraidof directly addressing many of the sacred cows ofChinese society.

Informed by his dual identity as Chinese citizenand Hong Kong resident, Leung remains rooted inthe cosmopolitanism of the latter, while possessingan intimate understanding of events and conditionson the mainland. While Leung’s Hong Kong ori-gins have provided a convenient excuse for his manymainland critics to dismiss his writings out of hand,they also make his writing all the more accessible toforeign readers unaccustomed to the excessively cir-cumspect style of traditional Chinese non-fiction.This collection represents the first steps towards amature public discourse in China.

Originally written as newspaper and magazinecolumns, the fact that these essays and their subjectmatter are still current is, to Leung, a cause for deepregret: “Only under one circumstance does socialcriticism have lasting value: when the things you’vewritten about continue to take place…”

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Ball Lightning ‡ Liu Cixin

Ball Lightning, by Liu Cixin

July, 2004Sichuan Science and Technology

Press282pp

Liu CixinAn engineer by trade, Liu Cixin began writing

science fiction in the early 1990s and published hisfirst short story in 1999. Over the past decade hehas won multiple awards for his fiction and has be-come China’s most popular domestic science fiction

author. Liu’s recent novels, beginning with the in-clusion of Ball Lightning as part of Science FictionWorld ’s Nebula series, have led to increased main-stream attention to the genre. The second volumeof his Three Body trilogy, The Dark Forest, made

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Ball Lightning ‡ Liu Cixin

a number of year-end best-of lists in 2008, and hiswork has been critiqued in literary journals such asBook City and Fiction World.

The sense of the importance and beauty of sci-ence that permeates Liu’s fiction is tempered withskepticism about the ability of scientists, world lead-ers, and the general public to handle technologi-cal developments responsibly. In addition to themilitary-themed work found in his recent novelsand short stories such as “Barrage Jamming” (2001Galaxy Award), many of Liu’s stories are popu-lated by ordinary characters drawn from contem-porary Chinese society: an instructor at a poor ru-ral school in “The Village Teacher” (2001 GalaxyReader’s Award), a migrant worker whose careerpath as a window-washer takes him into outer spacein “Chinese Sun” (2002 Galaxy Award), and a groupof schoolchildren thrust into world leadership posi-tions in The Supernova Era (2003).

Liu brings these themes together in the ThreeBody trilogy, a story loosely tied to the Ball Light-ning universe that narrates events between the firstcryptic messages Earth receives from extraterres-trial life and the eventual arrival, four centuries later,of a far more technologically advanced alien force.The first volume, a race against time to discover whothe aliens are and why they have recruited a cult onEarth, is followed by an ambitious second volumethat explores humanity’s preparations for an inva-sion by a vastly superior civilization, one that has

brought a halt to scientific progress on Earth and iscapable of eavesdropping on all of the planet’s com-munication. Liu’s inventive, fast-paced storytelling,imaginative, well-grounded science, and memorablecharacters have made the forthcoming third volumeone of China’s most anticipated science fiction nov-els.

Ball LightningWhen Chen’s parents are incinerated before his eyesby a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to dis-covering the secret of this mysterious natural phe-nomenon. His search takes him to stormy moun-taintops, an experimental military weapons lab, andan old Soviet science station. The more he learns,the more he comes to realize that ball lightning isonly the beginning of an entirely new frontier in par-ticle physics.

Although Chen’s quest provides a purpose for hislonely life, the chase for his elusive quarry brings himinto conflict with soldiers and scientists who havemotives of their own: a beautiful army major withan obsession with dangerous weaponry, and a physi-cist who has no place for ethical considerations inhis single-minded pursuit of knowledge.

Ball Lightning, by award-winning Chinese sci-ence fiction author Liu Cixin, is a fast-paced story ofwhat happens when the beauty of scientific inquiryruns up against a push to harness new discoverieswith no consideration of the possible consequences.

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