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Giles Whilttell reviews the George Hogg biography by James MacManus on the Times. The biography, Ocean Devil, has recently been adapted into a film, Children of Huang Shi, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh.

And the great rolling convulsion that seized China for 23 years, devouring tens of millions of innocents but leaving Mao triumphant, was another. This was a maelstrom of overlapping wars, famines, floods and generalised destruction fuelled by the greed of warlords, Japanese fascism, paranoid Chinese nationalism and overcooked Marxian ideology.

Through the chaos ran the fragile threads of countless individual stories, but few can have been more astonishing or, in the end, uplifting, than that of George Aylwin Hogg.

James MacManus, then a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, first heard about Hogg in an eavesdropped conversation at the British Embassy Club in Beijing in 1984. The account that he has pieced together since is of an Englishman abroad, but hardly of the cliché those words suggest.

Hogg had the prodigious stamina so often traced to the rainswept playing fields of English public schools, and he stood out in China for other obvious reasons, including his height, his hair, his “high nose” and the colour of his skin. But more than any of his compatriots who immersed themselves in war-torn China, he stands out for something else entirely: his goodness.

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Chinese author Ma Jian’s new book, Beijing Coma, will be published in May by Chatto & Windus.

Ma Jian says, “I wanted to write a book that would bear witness to recent history and help reclaim a people’s right to remember. Through my protagonist Dai Wei — a student lying in a coma after being shot in the Tiananmen Massacre — I was able to write about brutality and injustice, but also about the things that make life worth living: love, hope, freedom, truth, and the quest for the sublime. Imprisoned in his body for ten years, Dai Wei is forced to turn inwards and confront his past, and in doing so becomes freer and more alive than the comatose crowds that surround him. The act of remembering gives life its meaning. It is an act of defiance against tyranny and death. “

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Paul Watkins reviewed Jiang Rong’s critically-acclaimed book Wolf Totem. The English translation has recently published by Hamish Hamilton.

FEW PLACES ON EARTH conjure in the Western mind images of desolation quite as much as Inner Mongolia. Even for most Chinese, the region speaks of such remoteness that, once reached, returning is not always possible.

But one man, Jiang Rong, did return. In 1967, as an officer in the Red Guard, he left Beijing for a post among the nomadic Mongols, remaining until 1978. Back in Beijing, Rong waited many years before writing Wolf Totem, his first novel, which is closely based on his experiences in the Gobi. It sold millions of copies in China and won the recently created Man Asian Literary Prize (from the same people who brought us the Booker) and has secured a record £55,000 for translation rights into English.

Wolf Totem tells the story of Chen Zhen, a man much like Rong, who is sent to Mongolia during the time of the Cultural Revolution. Once there, his role of educating the local population is quickly superseded by his own education in their ancient way of life. The focus is upon the delicate balance between the sheep-herding nomads and the wolves that prey upon the flocks.

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Book review by Pin Lu

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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Motherbridge of Love, a picture book based on a poem written for an adopted daughter, has been selected by the Time Magazine in its 2007 Top Children’s Book List. The poem, sent to the charity Mothers’ Bridge of Love (MBL) by an anonymous author, describes the

feeling of an adoptive mother towards her new daughter, and the girl’s the birth mother. “One became your guiding star; the other became your sun,” it reads. Xinran, founder of MBL, and a renowned author of several books about Chinese women’s lives, first published the poem in her Guardian column in 2004. In 2006, MBL and Barefoot Books decided to produce a picture book based on the poem, and asked the Canadian artist Josée Masse to illustrate the poem.

“Our organisation’s aim is to connect the adopted children from China to their cultural roots, and help them to fully enjoy their life here and recognise their identity,” Wendy Wu, CEO of MBL, is very happy that the book has been well received, and hopes the sale of the book would help the running of the charity. MBL is also planning to present the book to donors as part of a new fund raising initiative.

“The poem is so beautiful, the illustration is absolutely gorgeous. It can be enjoyed by parents and children of all families. And you will give the adopted children a little bit more support too,” she says.

 

BBC Radio4 Woman’s Hour Drama is broadcasting a five part radio adaptation of Xiaolu Guo’s novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. The story is told by the protagonist Z, a young Chinese woman coming to London to study English, using bloken English. The book follows Z’s encounter with Western culture, her sexual awakening, freedom and frustration. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was shortlisted in last year’s Orange Broadband Prize.

Xiaolu Guo’s new novel, a rework of her early book in Chinese, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth will be published next month.

 

There is a small, but growing number of Chinese novelists who use Foreign languages to write books. For example, Ha Jin has published several critical acclaimed books in English, and recently two stories from Li Yiyun’s award-winning debute, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, has been adapted into two movies by the Chinese-American director Wayne Wang. In the UK, Guo Xiaolu’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers entered this year’s Orange Broadband Prize shortlist.

The following is an interview with a Chinese author, Shan Sa, who writes in French:

TOKYO (AFP) — Chinese author Shan Sa’s identity has circumnavigated the world — she lives in France, is impassioned by Japan and is now turning her attention to her homeland.

The novelist, whose real name is Yan Nini, has lived in Paris for more than half her life as part of a literary diaspora that stretched its wings as China began opening up to the world three decades ago.

Like many other emigre authors who write in a foreign tongue — Dai Sijie in French or Ha Jin in English — Shan Sa has written mostly in French, apart from her first book of poems when she was 10 years old.

Her books include “The Girl Who Played Go,” which won an award in France and has been translated into English but remains unpublished in Chinese.

Her most recent book is “Shall We Meet in Tokyo at Four in the Morning?” in which she explores her own roots. It has been published first not in French but in Japanese in a collaboration with Richard Collasse, head of French fashion house Chanel in Tokyo.

Full report.

 

Book review by Pin Lu: China Road: A Journey into the Future of the Rising Power

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.

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Book reviewed by Pin Lu on WaterInk

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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The following review is written by Pin Lu, published on his blog Water Ink.

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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