Three books, two (1-3) by the novelist and poet Qiu Xiaolong and the third (4) by the sinologist Robert van Gulik, bring inspector Chen Cao, the favourite character of Qiu Xiaolong readers, into the Tang Empire (618-907) while investigating in Shanghai a murder committed by Min, a famous “private table hostess”.

Min recovered the family house after the Cultural Revolution; beautiful and cultured, an icon of the internet, she invites different personalities to private dinners where they discover subjects of common interest during a gastronomic dinner prepared by Min and by Qing, her assistant.

The murder of Qing (1) is taken care of, to Chen Cao’s surprise, by the Internal Security and not by the Shanghai Police. Min disappears with the procedure of “shuanggui”, generally used for Party cadres and mentioned by the author in one of his previous novels (2); it is necessary to avoid the media in this investigation which is not in the interest of the Party!

Inspector Chen, has been appointed Director of the Office for the Reform of the Judicial System, “a position without real power”. He is asked by former partners to take an interest in Qing’s murder. He is surprised by this murder which makes him think of the investigation by Judge Ti (630-700) that he is reading and that Qiu Xiaolong has mentioned in a recently published novel (3).

Judge Ti is trying to understand how a famous poetess, Yu Xuanji (844-871), during the Tang Dynasty, was able to kill her servant and bury her without assistance.

This historical episode is well known and had already been described in 1968 by the diplomat and sinologist, Robert van Gulik, in the last of his novels, “Assassins and Poets” (4). Judge Ti succeeds in obtaining from Yu Xuanji a confession that elucidates the murder without threatening the Empress and her son Li. Yu Xuanji’s life before her execution is also mentioned by van Gulik in his classic book “Sex Life in Ancient China” (5).

Chen Cao feels himself very close to Judge Ti, who, like him, is going through a depressing professional period of a life devoted to high public office and politics. As for Chen Cao, poetry for Ti is an important part of his life, as is the will to leave behind him a somewhat legendary image of a civil servant with integrity.

– Judicial reform and the law:

Chen Cao is asked to publish a statement about the daring photos of a judge, Jiao, which create a huge scandal on the internet. This judge was a Party commissioner in the army; like many of his colleagues, he has no legal training, but he is devoted to orders; “the law, like everything else, is subject to the goodwill of the Party” (1p.58).

Chen will point out that evidence obtained illegally does not constitute admissible evidence in other countries. Jin, his secretary, who is pretty, cultured, independent, and of course susceptible to the inspector’s charm, will edit the press release that all media will use to support Jiao.

Chen Cao must be involved in the judicial reform and makes some contacts. Is the Party above the laws? Should judges serve the Party or the law? The official answer is that “our judges serve the law in the name of the Party” (1p.173).

An answer that cannot satisfy Chen Cao, “For years he had believed that, by working conscientiously within the system, he would be able to change things, but he now has to recognize that his hopes had been only wishful thinking. Gradually he became aware of his own powerlessness” (1 p.108).

Corruption is felt everywhere, but its modalities are changing: Min’s private dinners allowed the real estate developer, Shuang Guanhua, to carry out a very profitable project and Min to recover half of the profit to, she says, pay the Party executive who made the operation possible.

Another guest, the antique dealer Huang, underlines the very high prices of antiques and indicates that “some Party cadres refuse bribes in cash but accept antiques. If one day they are under scrutiny, they can always pretend that these are cheap counterfeits. » (1 p.76)

– Poetic works and television series:

Trying to trace Yu Xuangji’s poems, in fact allows Judge Ti to make progress with his investigation. For Chen Cao, his friends, thrilled by his references to Judge Ti’s investigation, would like him to pilot TV series on the famous judge. Other times, other priorities!

Yu Xuangji is a courtesan who, very young, was sold to a brothel. Her lovers, especially the poet Wan Tingyun, to whom she dedicated her most beautiful poems, made her famous. Van Gulik and Qiu Xiaolong liked “A Winter Evening”:

– Inprisonment and “shuanggi”:

 Judge Ti wants to meet the poetess in prison; he is amazed by her conditions of confinement; he gets her to wash, dress properly, and get a good dinner. She had been whipped in public because she stubbornly repeated an incredible version of the murder.

Judge Ti’s humanity allows him to convince Yu Xuangji to deliver an acceptable version while protecting the high-ranking character who was visiting her and who left her, leaving a yellow dress embroidered with a dragon and without trying to protect her.

Min is locked up in a hotel, she disappears; she is fed and not tortured, but some high-ranking figures fear that she will speak and it is fate that will lead the policewoman, Wanxia, to eat a dish prepared for Min and die poisoned.

The dangers accepted by Chen Cao’s secretary Jin, will make it possible to uncover the murderer of the assistant of Min and of the antique dealer Huang; Min should then be released and Chen Cao is invited, to his great surprise, by the Secretary of the Shanghai Police Party to holidays in the Yellow Mountains, one of the most beautiful sites, celebrated by generations of painters and poets.

They probably wanted to move him away to allow Internal Security to develop a correct version of the Min case or perhaps to get rid of Chen Cao for good. The future is unpredictable, a few days later, he is invited in Beijing to a seminar of the Party Academy, which has to prepare the opening of a central office of the reform of the judicial system in Beijing that Chen could lead.

Qiu Xiaolong and van Gulik, around Judge Ti :

Robert van Gulik (1910-1967), was born in the Netherlands and spent part of his childhood in the Dutch Indies; he studied at the University of Leiden and went on to join, as an interpreter, the diplomatic corps. A career that will lead to the post of ambassador in Tokyo but also to a life as an orientalist scholar. A long stay in Chongqing, during the war, where he began the long series of Judge Ti’s investigations (16 novels in English).

One must mention van Gulik’s qualities, the complexity of his plots, his use of tradition (especially the role of the foxes) and sometimes his recallings of the period of the Tang. In “Assassins and Poets”, an interesting character, the academician Chao, as complex as he is unpleasant, who commits suicide because he does not want to owe anything to the poetess who adores him, for him, “a vulgar whore”.

A style very different from that of Qiu Xiaolong. A writing a bit rigid, more traditional, an impression reinforced by the rather classical engravings drawn by the author. Judge Ti is more of a character than a person, he cannot move us or please us like Inspector Chen. Ti is faithful to the dynasty, he accepts the system with its flaws and is less disillusioned than Chen. Poetry and gastronomy are part of the pleasures of life, but it is not like Chen Cao, an essential part 

Bertrand Mialaret      

(1) Qiu Xiaolong, “Un dîner chez Min“, translated into French by Adélaïde Pralon; Liana Levi 2021, 250 pages. (Original English title “Inspector Chen and Judge Dee”).

(2) Qiu Xiaolong, “Cyber China”, Liana Levi, 2012.

(3) Qiu Xiaolong, “Une enquète du vénérable Juge Ti”, translated by Adélaïde Pralon, Liana Levi, 140 pages. 2020. (Original English title “The shadow of the empire”).

(4) Robert van Gulik, ” Assassins et poètes “, translated by Anne Krief. 10-18, 1985, 280 pages.

(5) Robert van Gulik, “La vie sexuelle dans la Chine ancienne”, translated from the English by Louis Evrard, Gallimard 1971.

Bei Dao is with Yang Lian and Duo Duo, one of the best-known Chinese poets of the Tiananmen generation in the West. His prose works have suffered from the celebrity of a poetry often considered as a candidate for a Nobel Prize.

Two collections of essays, translated into English, a beautiful novel ” Waves “ (1) and short stories ” 13 rue du Bonheur ” (2) which are completed by a superb autobiographical text “ City Gates Open Up” (3) which has just been translated into French by Chantal Chen-Andro.

1-Rebuilding his city:

Bei Dao, after 13 years of exile, finally obtains permission to return to Beijing to meet his sick father again. “I was a foreigner in my native country… I felt pushed to write this book: I wanted to rebuild a city, to rebuild my own Beijing through writing”.

The book brings back to life the attractions of the Beijing of his youth, the shadows, the lights, the smells, the noises. The child tells us about his environment, the toys and games, the transformations brought by the purchase of a television set and then of a record player.

He goes out of his neighbourhood, he goes fishing, he learns to swim but almost drowns in the lake of the Summer Palace. Many outings to look for grass for the rabbits which, during these years of famine, will end up in a pot. The food is very present, it was often missed during his youth.

The relationship with his mother is little talked about and does not seem very close; the relations between the parents are not very peaceful. A long chapter is devoted to his father. A well-known family but more ordinary in the last generations; a comfortable life, his father worked at the People’s Insurance Company of China and then at the Chinese Association for the Promotion of Democracy.

His father reads a lot and is interested in technology. Relationships will be close with his younger sister who died in an accident, more distant with a younger brother and generally of conflict with his father, “every Chinese man harbours within him a little tyrant…at home, he must be the supreme master. » (p.321)

Bei Dao talks at length about the areas his family lived in and their neighbours. In the summer of 1965, he was admitted to High School No. 4, the best high school in Beijing, to the great pride of his parents and neighbours. He reads a lot, including forbidden books hidden in the attic and which will have to be handed over to the Neighbourhood Committee; “the experience of reading is like a lamppost for the road, it illuminates the darkness of human existence” (p.169).

2-Bei Dao and the Cultural Revolution:

He is not even a member of the Youth League, but as soon as classes stopped in June 1966, he devoted himself to wall newspapers and indictments. In August, he goes to live at the high school where he will stay for two years. A teacher commits suicide, the struggle between different factions becomes brutal, he publishes the Journal of the Cultural Revolution at the Lycee. He took part in the Grand Exchange and visited many towns to bear witness to the Cultural Revolution.

The takeover of the Red Guards will lead him to be re-educated through work, eleven years in two construction companies. His parents will be sent to the “Ecole des Cadres du 7 Mai” to be “reformed”.

This vision of the inside of the Cultural Revolution is very fascinating, but Bei Dao does not take stock of his disillusions. With his poem “Answer” (Huida), he becomes the spokesman of a generation; it is above all a question of asserting his freedom, the refusal of the dictatorship of any authority.

The book suffers from an accumulation of details that are not necessary: why tell the history of all the neighbours, classmates… Of course, to focus on the evolution of certain characters is essential but choices have to be made.

The beautiful work of the translator who respects the different styles is to be commended; the rather cold and intellectual approach of Bei Dao is underlined, quite different from the way Chantal Chen-Andro translates Mo Yan! Numerous photos of the family, 30 pages of brief and precise notes, a ten-page history of Beijing and its gates and finally an afterword.

Bei Dao pays homage to his translator in “Midnight’s Gate” and makes her portrait (p.61) during his first stay in Paris in July 1985.

3- ” Waves “, a beautiful novel:

This text was finished in 1974, reworked and published in 1979 in the magazine Jintian. At the time, it was a novel that was completely new in style and topics. Five characters, monologues, no dialogues; no political support in the style of socialist realism. A novel of atmosphere, moods, sensations. The characters live in a state of failure after the collapse of ideals; the system favours selfishness and corruption.

Lin Dongping is a Party cacique, who refuses to be associated with decisions taken in high levels which wants to have them endorsed by the grassroots; likewise, he questions what has become of the compensation for disaster relief?

 Yang Xun spent a few days in prison for opposing a tax. He met Xiao Ling, a 23-year-old woman with a little girl, a very endearing and lively character, but a little lost; “Yes, it’s true, I need someone to love me, need someone to help me, if only with a few words of tenderness. In the past, I had a father, a mother, friends… ” (p.53). She talks about her divorce, about working in a factory.

Other characters, Bai Hua, a slightly rogue but generous caretaker. No dramatic progression of the plot even if Yang Xun has to return to Beijing. With Xiao Ling, they don’t know how to build themselves together and love is an illusion.

4- Some short stories:

The collection “13 Rue du Bonheur” includes five short stories. The title short story reminds us that Bei Dao at that time read “The Nausea” by Sartre and “The Castle” by Kafka.

Who lives at 13? He is a journalist, he goes to the Neighbourhood Committee and then to the Public Security Bureau. They all escape from their responsibilities: it’s not my responsibility, we have to have a meeting, 13 is not on the map! “Every time you find yourself in the presence of an individual, tell yourself that you’re dealing with a guilty party…yes, that’s what we call class struggle” (p.113). The narrative becomes surreal and the absurd reigns.

“A stranger returns” is a beautiful text, albeit a little melodramatic. The father is back after 20 years of re-education through work, he has been totally rehabilitated and given a good home; the “friends” return. His daughter has not seen him since the age of four and has regretted the love she did not have. A little and old man arrives who is still terrorized in his behaviour by the rules of the camp. She isolates herself in her room, her mother accuses her of selfishness and stresses that he survived only for his children.

He asks her to accompany him to the park where he used to take her for walks as a child. They talk, he says that he has not been able to protect her, that he is not worthy to be her father. They cry, he gives her a necklace he made for her in the camp out of old toothbrush handles.

5- Essays about exile:

Two collections are only available in English.

” Midnight’s Gate “ (5) essentially tells us about the personalities he met during his literary tours during his period of exile. It details the people in charge of the Poetry Festivals who are often poets, but also men of power.

 He travels around the world, a bit of tourism, superficial encounters and pleasant dinners with good wines; “In my wanderings overseas, alcohol has been my most loyal companion. It consoles and make promises…it never betrays you and at worst it gives you a headache for a few days” (p.194).

He speaks at length about his stay in Palestine, the unacceptable attitude of the Israelis and his reception by Arafat. As Octavio Paz says, “poetry is a third voice apart from religion and revolutions. This voice cannot truly eliminate hatred, but perhaps can alleviate it to some degrees”. (p.105).

He mentions very little of his poetry or his works, does not give us the reactions of his colleagues; this is a bit disappointing. He details life in New York which he does not like: “a truly nostalgic destination. It’s like driving a car: look straight ahead, don’t look back, just let your mind idle, perfectly aware of what has disappeared behind you” (p.41).

He underlines the contacts he appreciated: Wolfgang Kubin in Germany, Gregory Lee during his stay in Durham, “he understood China better than many other sinologists” (p.205).

“The Blue House” (4) tells about his removals: “In the six years between 1989 and 1995, I lived in seven different countries and moved fifteen times” (p.213). He details his family life, his relationship with his daughter Tiantian and especially his loneliness: “for Chinese in the West, the worst thing is loneliness; a deep sense of isolation. Americans understand this from the day they are born, but we Chinese must learn it “(p.195).

He is isolated and a little depressed; the Americans he meets help him: Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Eliot Weinberger, Jonathan Spence… A true friend will be for him the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, very popular in his country and Nobel Prize winner; he talks about him with emotion and makes us want to read him.

He mentions his life in California in Davis and his liking for gambling: “Chinese like to gamble, something that I think is related to a national propensity for the irrational, a belief in fate rather than gods…There is also no linguistic or cultural barriers…if you lose today there is always tomorrow”(p.241).

Bertrand Mialaret

(1) Bei Dao, “Waves”, translated by Chantal Chen-Andro. Editions Philippe Picquier 1993, 193 pages.

Bei Dao, ” Waves “, translated by BonnieS. McDougall and Suzette Ternent Cooke, New Directions 1990, 208 pages.

(2) Bei Dao, ” 13 rue du Bonheur “, translated by Chantal Chen-Andro. Circé 1999, 112 pages.

(3) Bei Dao, ” S’ouvrent les Portes de la Ville, Pékin 1949-2001 “, translated by Chantal Chen-Andro. Ypsilon June 2020, 380 pages.

Bei Dao, “City Gates Open Up”, translated by Jeffrey Yang. New Directions, April 2017.

(4) Bei Dao, “The Blue House”, translated by Ted Huters and Feng-ying Ming. Zephir Press 2000,260 pages.

(5) Bei Dao, “Midnight’s Gate”, translated by Matthew Fryslie. New Directions, 2005. 255 pages.

China is the largest book publisher in the world and yet reading Chinese novels does not always get very good press. With the six books that we are recommending, we hope to show a different picture: these are books that have been translated over the last two years into French and English and are readily available from online sellers in book form and often as electronic files.

High quality texts, very different themes and styles that have been supported by articles into French and English on my blog   www.mychinesebooks.com.

– Chi Zijian: “Snow and Crows” (1)

This novel does not take us away from the coronavirus; the book was published in China in 2010 on the anniversary of the 1910/1911 plague epidemic that killed 60,000 people in Manchuria in northern China. The novelist brings us back to the city of Harbin, which at the time was populated mainly by Russians and was developing with the Trans-Siberian railway.

Very diverse characters, a tone that avoids the tragic. An epidemic that is misjudged by the authorities: it is not a bubonic plague transmitted by rats but a pulmonary plague that spreads like the coronavirus.

A Chinese doctor, born in Malaysia and trained in Cambridge, Wu Liande, puts in place all the techniques to control the epidemics that we face every day: lockdown, masks, emergency hospitals, isolation of the districts and the city of Harbin.

The struggle between specialists can be quite tough and a French doctor, supported by the consular authorities, will try unsuccessfully to oust him; he will die for refusing a mask, his obituary in a newspaper of the city of Brest in France is a masterpiece of colonial literature!

– Wu Ming-yi, “The Magician on the Bridge” (2)

A completely different book, a collection of beautiful short stories by one of Taiwan’s great writers. The Chunghua market, in the heart of the megalopolis of Taipei, the capital, consists of eight buildings linked by footbridges. It could be the author’s kingdom, a link that unites the merchants, the author and his classmates; the space for all the adventures for children and their families that are at the centre of many stories.

Lots of emotion, a poetic tone and the key character, the magician, who sells magic tricks to children. “It is only when forgetfulness intertwines with memory that memories deserve to become stories” (p.252).

– Fang Fang: “Soft Burial” (3)

A novelist who is much talked about because she has just published a blog about her more than two months of confinement in Wuhan, in the heart of the coronavirus outbreak.

“Soft Burial” is a great novel; on the border of Sichuan province, families of large landowners are expropriated by the land reform of 1947 to 1952: 40% of the land changed hands throughout China with at least 1.5 million dead. Soft burials are a source of terror, a body buried directly in the ground has the risk of not being able to reincarnate.

This is not a historical novel. It is a very complex book, beautifully arranged between past and present and the two lives of the heroine, Hu Daiyin, who lost her memory in 1952. Sometimes you feel like you are in a detective novel, the characters discover common backgrounds ; a calm, a very calm tone with sometimes superb descriptions of large gardens and houses.

Many people died because Mao Zedong wanted to eliminate landowners and village chiefs so the Party could control the peasants. In Taiwan, it was only a question of redistributing land and the agrarian reform was carried out without victims.

– Qiu Xiaolong: “China, hold your breath” (4)

Everyone knows about Inspector Chen Cao’s police investigations, written by Qiu Xiaolong, a novelist and poet, born in Shanghai and living in the United States since 1988.Ten novels, translated into some 20 languages and sold more than two million copies.

Qiu Xiaolong manages to create a detective novel and to hook his readers with a difficult subject, air pollution. We find Shanshan, the love of Chen Cao, whom we met around Lake Tai in a previous novel; for her, “people don’t believe in anything anymore…So the problem is not only water, air or food pollution, it’s also mind pollution” (p.146).

The impact of pollution in China is considerable and we have seen, with an economy partially at a standstill with the coronavirus, that this pollution could decrease dramatically (same observation in Paris).

Qiu Xiaolong also talks to us about poetry and gastronomy. A reading that makes you hungry. Amazing dishes, recipes transmitted by e-mail which can also be a way to communicate secretly!

– Yan Lianke, “The Death of the Sun” (5)

A great novelist who should be crowned with a Nobel Prize even though the majority of his works are not available in China. Published in Taiwan in 2015, this book is a kind of philosophical tale. An incredible night to be told by a fifteen-year-old boy, Li Niannian.

 As soon as night falls, we see cases of sleepwalking, often of peasants heading towards their fields to harvest their wheat. As for Li Niannian’s family, they continue to run their funeral shop and to inform against those who bury their dead because a law has made cremation compulsory.

Incredible, absurd or grotesque events. Myth no doubt, but a living novel, descriptions, dialogues that capture the reader; the narration floats like a sleepwalker. The author refers to President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” but points out that with the very strict control of information, generations of Chinese have been like sleepwalkers without realizing it. It is also a plunge into the darkness of the human soul. Sleepwalking frees conventions and reveals true personalities.

– Sanmao, a superstar writer: (6)                                     

Nearly thirty years after her death, she remains a celebrity in China and Taiwan. Her best-known book, “Stories of the Sahara” has just been translated into English; a huge success in 1976, millions of copies sold. A romantic existence, the absolute reference for young Chinese women dazzled by her audacity, her love stories and above all her travels to some fifty countries. After studying in Taiwan, she travels, publishes and marries Jose Maria Quero, with whom she goes to live in El Aaiun, the capital of this part of the Sahara, Spanish at that time.

A beautiful book, with around twenty very different texts: daily life, travels, neighbours, her role as an educator and nurse. A pleasant style, an endearing personality, a book that is easy to read and has no historical or ethnological claims.

After Jose’s accidental death, she returns to Taiwan but the last years will be dark despite her fame. Finally, a song, “The Olive Tree”, for which she wrote the lyrics (sung by Chyi Yu).

Bertrand Mialaret

(1) Chi Zijian, ” Neige et Corbeaux “, translated into French by F. Sastourné. Editions P. Picquier, March 2020, 350 pages, 21.50 euros.

(2) Wu Ming-yi, ” Le magicien sur la passerelle “, translated by Gwennaël Gaffric, L’Asiathèque, March 2017, 270 pages, 19.50 euros.

(3) Fang Fang, “Funérailles Molles”, translated by Brigitte Duzan assisted by Zhang Xiaoqiu; L’Asiathèque 2019, 460 pages, 24.50 euros.

(4) Qiu Xiaolong, ” Chine retiens ton souffle “, translated from English by Adélaïde Pralon , Editions Liana Levi, 2018, 250 pages, Pocket, 7.20 euros.   In English, ” Hold your breath China “, First World Publications, April 2020.

(5) Yan Lianke, “La mort du soleil”, translated by Brigitte Guilbaud. Editions P. Picquier, February 2020, 385 pages, 22.50 euros.   In English, “The day the sun died”, translated by Carlos Rojas, Chatto&Windus. London 2018, 340 pages.

(6) Sanmao, “Stories of the Sahara”, translated by Mike Fu, Bloomsbury, 2019, 390 pages.

With the epidemic, sales of Camus’ “The Plague” strongly increased in Italy and France. A good omen for Chi Zijian’s novel “Neige et Corbeaux” (1) (White Snow, Black Crows) which has just been translated into French with talent by François Sastourné and published by Editions Philippe Picquier.

The novel was released in China in 2010, as an anniversary of the plague in Harbin and Manchuria that killed 60,000 people in 1910/1911. Harbin is now a city of 11 million inhabitants, north-east of Beijing, known worldwide for its ice sculpture competition.

Founded in 1898, Harbin grew rapidly with the Trans-Siberian Railway and had a population of 100,000 people, mostly Russians living along the Songhua River, a city that retains some very beautiful architectural features. On the other side of the river is the Chinese district of Fujiadian (now Daowai), which was quite miserable and has no comparable monuments.

The author has carried out an extensive documentation work that I could test on several subjects. She has the ability to bring to life this vision of the past and to create characters that illustrate this historical period.

Chi Zijian, a writer from the Far North :

She was born in 1969 in Mohe, one of the northernmost settlements in China where temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius are common. She has written wonderful short stories, three collections published In French by Bleu de Chine from 1997 to 2004, then “Toutes les nuits du monde” (3).

This was followed by a short novel about the Jewish community of Harbin, ” Goodnight Rose ” (2) and a magnificent evocation of the Evenki people, nomadic reindeer herders (” The last quarter of the moon”) (4). The translator of this book, Bruce Humes, writes some comments about the plague and translates into English pages of “White Snow, Black Crows”. (bruce-humes.com/archives/12934)

In “White Snow, Black Crows”, Chi Zijian wanted to revive Fujiadian before and during the plague epidemic by showing the impact of the disease on daily life and its limitations; “in other words, I wanted to put aside the bleached skeletons and describe life under the cloud of death” (p.360).  Yet the number of deaths in Fujiadian has exceeded 5,000, or nearly three out of every ten people.

The characters are many and very diverse: an eunuch, Zhai Yisheng, a redeemed prostitute, a Russian singer, Sennikova, a restaurant, a distillery, grain storage areas. The town of Harbin is an important character.

Many aspects remind us of the Covid-19 epidemic that we are experiencing and the attitude of our fellow citizens who lack discipline; perhaps they think like in Harbin, that contagion is inevitable and that one must lead a normal life!

But the tone of the novel is not tragic, life goes on despite the deaths and quarantines. The book comes back after several chapters on many characters that we thought forgotten. This is why we can regret that the publisher did not give us the necessary gift of a list of characters and their relationships.

Crows, a protective animal:

We meet these birds often: children play with them, some inhabitants feed them regularly, they nest in the tops of trees. In Harbin, they sadly accompany the funeral whereas before the confinements, it was a festive occasion. 

In Europe, they are certainly associated with winter, but also with poverty and misfortune. In Manchuria, they are not at the origin of the plague epidemic that comes from marmots and their hunters. The Manchu people revere them just like the swan and the dog. They do not eat dogs and do not use their skins.

Nurhaci, founder of the Qing Dynasty, was saved by a group of crows who hid his body and allowed him to escape from his enemies. In thanksgiving, in the centre of the courtyard of the Shenyang palace, stands a seven-metre wooden pole with a receptacle to feed the crows and offer a sacrifice to Heaven.

A dramatic epidemic:

In Wuhan, the coronavirus outbreak was correctly detected but some city CP officials forced the doctors to keep quiet. The situation in Manchuria was different but poorly assessed: the first step was to fight against a bubonic plague by trying to eliminate the vectors, the rats.

The epidemic spread rapidly, with the Russians and Japanese controlling the railways putting pressure on the Chinese government so as the consuls of various foreign countries. It was then that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked Wu Liande, recently invited as vice-director of the Tianjin Medical School, to go to Harbin to investigate the disease.

Chi Zijian chooses “not to model a heroic character in (her) novel, although Wu Liande is the hero who has restored the situation”, (p.359). Wu Liande (1879-1960) was born in Penang, Malaysia, to a new immigrant father and a second-generation immigrant mother. He was educated in Penang and then in Cambridge. A brilliant academic and then clinical career at St Mary’s Hospital in London.

In Harbin, he hardly speaks Chinese, but he has an assistant Li Jiarui. He begins by dissecting a corpse to discover that it is in fact a pneumonic plague that is transmitted directly from man to man. This discovery is not accepted by Dr. Hoffkine, the director of the Russian hospital and by a Frenchman, Dr. Gérald Mesny, sent as a reinforcement by the government and who, unhappy to be under the authority of a young Chinese, will try unsuccessfully to get rid of him.

Wu Liande will very quickly implement the techniques to control an epidemic that we hear about every day: no contacts, masks, quarantine, travel control…. The town of Harbin is cut off from the world by the army. The corpses that could not be buried because of the frost are incinerated, a decision taken “at the highest level”. Railway carriages are used as a field hospital. Even the Catholic Church in Harbin and its French priests had to submit and evacuate the sick they were hiding.

A colonial conflict:

Doctor Gerald Mesny, who, despite the support of the French legation, failed to oust Wu Liande, continued his medical job, but without the protection of a mask, he will die of pneumonic plague.

An obituary appeared in a French newspaper in Brest on 4/3/1911 entitled “A dictator of hygiene in China”. We have forgotten the tone of these colonial chronicles; this one is hallucinating by its style when it speaks of China, by its contempt, by its oversights on the misdiagnosis of a doctor who is praised for his contribution to the greatness of France.

A monument in his memory was inaugurated in Brest in 1921, then it was melted down. The small bust is kept in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

As for Wu Liande, he was decorated, chaired the International Conference on the Plague in Shenyang, published in The Lancet and remained in China until the Japanese occupation. In 1937, he returned to Malaysia, to Ipoh, where he worked as a general practitioner and treated the poor free of charge. He opened the Tun Razak Library in Ipoh and retired in Penang at the age of 80. An association supports his memory there and his daughter wrote his biography (5).

Bertrand Mialaret

(1) Chi Zijian, “Neige et Corbeaux”, translated into French by François Sastourné, P. Picquier, 2020, 360 pages, 21.50 euros.

(2) Chi Zijian, “Bonsoir la Rose”, translated by Stéphane Lévêque and Yvonne André; P. Picquier, May 2015, 185 pages, 20 euros. (In English, “Good Night Rose”, translated by Poppy Toland, Penguin China Books, October 2018, 180 pages)

(3) Chi Zijian, “Toutes les nuits du monde”, translated by Yvonne André and Stéphane Lévêque; P. Picquier, 2013.

(4) Chi Zijian, “Le Dernier Quartier de Lune”, translated by Yvonne André and Stéphane Lévêque ; P. Picquier, September 2015, 360 pages, 22 euros. (In English, « The last quarter of the moon », translated by Bruce Humes, Harvill Secker 2013, 320 pages).

(5) Wu Yu-lin, “Memories of Dr Wu Lien Teh: Plague Fighter”, reprinted by Areca Books, 2016.

It’s a pity that Singapore and Malaysian literature is not reviewed more often. In Malaysia, there is a state-sponsored literary life for the Malaysian language and little international exposure, but for literature in English, writers like Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng, are known all over the world. In Singapore, many writers are supported but also sometimes controlled by the government; cultural life has improved a lot in the last years.

This is why we were pleased that a conference was held in Paris last November, led by Tash Aw and bringing together young female writers from Malaysia and Singapore: Sharlene Teo, YZ Chin, Amanda Lee Koe and the Malaysian Preeta Samarasan who lives in France.

– Sharlene Teo and “Ponti”:

We’ve already met Sharlene Teo who prefaced Sanmao’s beautiful novel “Stories of the Sahara” that we reviewed a few weeks ago. Sharlene was born in Singapore and has been living in England for ten years, where she studied law (she is a lawyer but has never practiced), then literature and creative writing in Norwich, at the University of East Anglia.

In 2017, Sharlene was invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Since 1967, this three-month residency program, has hosted 1,400 writers from more than 150 countries, some of whom, like Mo Yan, will go on to win the Nobel Prize. The goal of the program is to create contacts among residents and with established American writers and to provide exposure to American academic life.

The negative impact of creative writing studies has sometimes been pointed out, “Ponti” is a good example. The book is structured around two young women, Circé and Szu, and Szu’s mother, Amisah. Two narrators and several different periods of their lives without any chronological concern but trying to capture the reader’s attention. The result is a rather artificial narrative structure with frequent breaks, risks of repetition and above all a lack of follow-up in the psychological analysis of the characters. This is the main weakness of “Ponti”.

The book was supported by scholarships and prizes even before it was finished. Support by critics, a novel published by Picador (1) and quickly translated into French (2). Very positive reviews, in my opinion a little too much. Sharlene Teo is preparing her second novel and is going to teach at Saint Mary’s University in Twickenham near London.

– A “Ponti”, a “Pontianak”, a terrifying ghost:

Szu’s mother, Amisah, has performed in three films as the lead actress. She plays the role of Pontianak, a female ghost, a vampire, a woman who died in childbirth, who feeds on men she kills with her nails.

In the real life, these three films were shot from 1957 onwards by B.N. Rao, produced by Cathay-Keris Studio and starring Maria Menado, considered the most beautiful woman in Malaysia. The first film was a great success, with realistic scenes and spectators fainting in the cinemas. A new team produced later “The Revenge of the Pontianak” in 2019.

– Amisah, a kampong girl turned star:

An interesting character, she was born in a small village in Malaysia, near the sea, in the mangrove swamps. She has six brothers but the only person she loves is Didi, a younger brother. She is cold and distant but very beautiful. She works in Singapore at the ticket desk of a small cinema called The Paradise. Wei Loong courts her, he is an antique restorer; they get married in 1977.

She works at the cinema entrance desk, she meets a film director who offers her the lead role of Pontianak in three films. The films are a commercial failure. Her husband is jealous of the director who, in 1983, will leave for Hong Kong. The couple buys a house with the money won in the lottery and Amisah will return to her cinema.

In 1987, Szu Min was born, a “happy accident”. Amisah no longer loved Wei Loong, she only loved him because he was in love with her. In 2003, Wei Loong leaves to the great despair of Szu Min who feels that her mother will never show her any affection.

– Circé and Szu, a fusional friendship:

Szu is not a beauty and Circé, sociable and happy to live, comes from a wealthy family. At school, they don’t have a boyfriend. Circe has a brother, Leslie, a handsome 18-year-old boy who is a little older than the two girls; Szu is quite fond of him.

The two girls are very close; the students’ outings allow the author to evoke the city of Singapore and in particular the famous Haw Par Villa Park and its famous “Courts of Hell”. We don’t hear much about the city except about its climate, but not about the different districts or the food which is one of the main attractions of this place.

Szu and Circe often visited Amisah very sick in hospital. The death of her mother did not reconcile Szu with her: “I spent so much time hating her.” The two girls are drifting away from each other. Circe blames her for her constant complaints, her feeling of superiority and her ability to hate those around her; she no longer wants to be her babysitter.

Seventeen years later, Szu, who has stopped her studies, has a little girl; Circe has divorced her husband Jarrold. She’s working on the promotion of a movie, a remake of Pontianak. Little is known about her, about her ambitions, her parents, her daily life. In her reunion with Szu, the past is very present in all their dialogues, as is Amisah, who played an important role in the relationship between the two women.

We won’t touch again on the book’s structure, its main weakness. On the other hand, the style is very pleasant: few dialogues, beautiful images, a little humour, a very sophisticated text. The Singaporean culture is not very present in the relations between Circe and Szu, but the Pontianak occupies a lot of space! We’ll talk again about Sharlene Teo.

Bertrand Mialaret

(1) Sharlene Teo, “Ponti”, Picador, 2018. 290 pages.

(2) Sharlene Teo, “Ponti”, translated into French by Mathilde Bach, Buchet Chastel, 2019, 312 pages, 20 euros.

Yan Lianke is one of the most important contemporary novelists, who could become a Nobel prize winner. A major work, “The Death of the Sun” (La mort du soleil) (1) has just been published by Editions Philippe Picquier, which has done a considerable amount of work, with ten publications, to make Yan Lianke’s novels better known.

The book has been translated into French by Brigitte Guilbaud, whose translations of several of the author’s novels have been appreciated, specially “Les jours, les mois, les années” (2); she is a novelist, teacher and currently Inspector for Chinese with the French Ministry of Education.

Like the author and the publisher, at the opening of the novel, she pays tribute to Sylvie Gentil, who died nearly two years ago and who translated five books by Yan Lianke, including another masterpiece, “The Four Books” (3).

 Translations into English have multiplied under the impetus of Carlos Rojas, a professor at Duke University, who translated five of his novels, including “The Day the Sun Died” (4) in 2018, which within a few months received flattering appreciations throughout the world.

This novel was published in Taiwan in 2015 and, like the vast majority of Yan Lianke’s works, is not allowed in China. The book was crowned in 2016 by the prestigious prize awarded every two years to a novel written in Chinese by an international jury in Hong Kong (5).

– A tragic night:

This is not a historical portrait as in other of his books or a realistic or mythical narrative, even if death everywhere reminds us of the Cultural Revolution. In the small town of Gaotian, in the centre of China, a fifteen-year-old boy, Li Niannian, will tell us in eleven chapters about this incredible night. Niannian is neither particularly bright nor educated, but he has a sense of family and responsibility.

The first cases of somnambulism occur at nightfall, the first deaths too concerning elders who drown in the canal; often peasants who want to continue harvesting their wheat. “So that was sleepwalking. A wild bird that entered a man’s mind and made him disorderly. His thoughts, he makes them come true in his dreams. What he must not do, he does precisely” (p.34).

– A family living on death:

Likewise, Niannian’s sleeping mother continues her paper cut-outs for the funeral. The family operates a store, “A New World”, which sells funeral articles and lives comfortably on them. Funerals are the subject of violent controversy because cremation is now mandatory, something this rural society most often refuses. The rituals surrounding death, the coffin, the grave, are essential elements of this civilization.

Cremation must be imposed even if traditional funerals are impossible in the cities due to lack of space in cemeteries. It is a question of conserving arable lands or transforming cemeteries into agricultural areas.

In Zhoukou in Henan (Yan Lianke’s province), corpses are to be moved after free cremation. In Jiangxi province, bonuses are given to families who hand over the coffin to the funeral service.

In our novel, Niannian’s father, Li Tianbo, systematically informed against families who proceeded to burials and then received 400 yuan from his wife’s brother who ran the crematorium. He would by force retrieve the coffins and eventually blow up the graves. The ashes of the deceased were given to the families but the oil from the bodies was kept by Li Tianbao in barrels.

– Yan Lianke, a character in the novel:

The novelist is very close to Niannian who reads his books but doesn’t understand them and can’t quote them correctly. Yan Lianke is a celebrity of Gaotian but the writer is very concerned about his inability to write new stories; he gets old, he withdraws into himself. In his sleepwalking fits, inspiration invades him but abandons him as soon as he wakes up; this extraordinary night will provide him with a subject.

“Because of sleepwalking, one man after another died. Not all of them threw themselves into the river: some stole, looted, were stabbed. It seemed as if the main road was swarming with the sound of bandits’ footsteps. You also had the impression that you couldn’t hear anything” (p.175).

The arrival of villagers from the surrounding area accelerated the looting. These peasants were frustrated of not being able to become city dwellers and went to “help themselves” in the shops of the village. The local authorities do nothing but banquet and donning mandarin costumes forgotten by a theatre company and pretending to relive the Taiping kingdom.

Sleepwalking can lead to making amends. Li Tianbo wants to make amends and admits that it was he who informed against the forbidden funerals; similarly, a neighbour admits to having poisoned her husband. Li Tianbo and his son try to limit sleepwalking by providing neighbours and friends with strong tea to keep them awake; they are the ones who will ultimately save the town and allow the sun to shine again.

-Political criticism and entering the secrets of human soul:

Several interviews with Yan Lianke allow the author to clarify his thoughts (6). This somnambulism refers to Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream”, even if it indicates that “the personal dream is more important than the national dream”. “The country is like a boat floating on the sea and you have no idea where it is going to float next. This is what makes Chinese people most insecure. Just like in the story, all the dreamers are very clear what they want to do but when they wake up, they do not know” (6b). “Because information is so tightly controlled, generations of Chinese have been dreamwalking through life without realizing it” (7).

But at the same time, the novelist says it is a plunge into the depths of the human soul, into its darkness. Sleepwalking frees us from conventions and reveals true personalities.

Just as Lu Xun in the preface to “Cries” compared society to an iron house and tried to use literature to awaken his fellow citizens, so Yan Lianke hopes that “his writing, in other words, is like the blind man with the flashlight who shines his light into the darkness to help others glimpse their goal and destination” (Preface by Carlos Rojas).

– A great literary talent:

Only one night, eleven chapters and sections that refer to the traditional time tracking system (geng-dian). A slow progression; it is the logic of this night that keeps the reader awake without the numerous events being organized to revive his interest.

Few characters, the narration is done by Niannian and this intervention of a teenager makes these unheard of episodes more acceptable. It is one of the writer’s talents in many of his books, to make us share incredible, absurd or grotesque events by letting us believe that it is a normal course of events. Myth, realism or rather mythorealism, the reality in China is so unlikely that it often defies acceptance.

This night is not treated like a fable; the novel is alive, the descriptions, the dialogues, the events catch the reader’s eye, but the style sometimes gives the impression that the narration floats like a sleepwalker. In my opinion, from a literary point of view, this is Yan Lianke’s most beautiful book.

In a few weeks, “Three Brothers, memories of my family” will be published; an autobiographical text translated by Carlos Rojas (8), a large part of which has already been published by P. Picquier in 2010 (“Songeant à mon père” (9)). The author recounts his youth in his village in the province of Henan, the poverty of his parents and uncles and his desire to become a writer.

He will certainly surprise us again. He tells us (7) about a new novel “Heart Sutra” devoted to religion. He is not a believer but religion interests him because “in China, the development of religion is the best lens through which to view the health of a society…Every religion, when it was imported to China, is secularized…What is absent in Chinese civilization, what we’ve always lacked, is a sense of the sacred. There is no room for higher principles when we live so firmly in the concrete”.

Carlos Rojas is currently busy translating “Hard like Water”, which is also being translated for Editions Philippe Picquier by Noël Dutrait, professor emeritus, famous translator of two Nobel Prize winners, Mo Yan and Gao Xingjian. This novel is a satire on love and the Cultural Revolution, which has already been successfully published in Vietnam and Japan.

Bertrand Mialaret

(1) Yan Lianke, “La mort du soleil”, translated by Brigitte Guilbaud. Editions Philippe Picquier; February 2020, 385 pages, 22.50 euros.

(2) Yan Lianke, “Les jours, les mois, les années”, translated by Brigitte Guilbaud. Editions Philippe Picquier, February 2009, 128 pages.

(3) Yan Lianke, “The Four Books”, translated by Sylvie Gentil. Editions Philippe Picquier, September 2015, 515 pages.

(4) Yan Lianke, “The day the sun died”, translated by Carlos Rojas. Chatto &Windus London 2018, 340 pages.

(5) “The dream of the Red Chamber award”, awarded every two years by the Hong Kong Baptist University.      

(6) Interviews: a/The Guardian 22/9/2018, Lesley McDowell.

                         b/ The Herald 1/9/2018, Jackie McGlone.

(7) The New Yorker 15/10/2018 “Yan Lianke’s forbidden satires of China” by Jiayang Fan; a first class interview.

(8) Yan Lianke, “Three Brothers, memories of my family,” translated by Carlos Rojas; Grove Press, 224 pages, March 2020.

(9) Yan Lianke, “Songeant à mon père”, translated by Brigitte Guilbaud, Editions P. Picquier ; 2010, 120 pages.

In February 2014, I posted a short analysis of the works of Xiao Hong, one of the most important novelists of 20th century Chinese literature, who died in Hong Kong in 1942, at the age of 31, after a ten years literary career. The anniversary of her death in 2012 provided the opportunity for strong media promotion: theatre production, opera and a film “Falling Flowers” by Huo Jianqi which did not meet with the success hoped for.

Two years later, the release of “The Golden Era” by leading filmmaker Ann Hui could have put Xiao Hong’s work back in the spotlight. Indeed, Ann Hui has made a number of quality films and recently in 2012, “A Simple Life”, who won many awards at the Venice Film Festival.

“The Golden Era” is a biopic, much too long, featuring famous actors including Tang Wei in the lead role. The staging is sometimes unnecessarily sophisticated; the lighting systematically seeks chiaroscuro, but who can surpass Rembrandt or Georges de la Tour?

The film says little about the novelist’s work and focuses on her love life, but it skillfully recreates the atmosphere of the time and evokes the relations between Xiao Hong and the great writer Lu Xun. He will support her and will have “Land of Life and Death” (1) published. After the death of Lu Xun in 1936, Xiao Hong wrote “A rememberance of Lu Xun”, a fascinating text about the daily life of this writer and his family and his relationship with Xiao Hong (2).

– A publishing work raise questions:

Les Editions de la Cerise, a publisher from Bordeaux, published in March 2019, an “adapted and illustrated” version of “Memories of Hulan Hé” (3), for which Shao Baoqing, a lecturer at the University of Bordeaux, thought he could write a preface. It is doubtful that such a “break up” of Xiao Hong’s work will have it appreciated by the French public, especially since the writer’s other novels are not even mentioned.

Simone Cross-Morea’s beautiful translation of the “Tales of the Hulan River” (4), does justice to this great book. The translator’s blog (www.xiaohong.fr ), which includes translations of Xiao Hong’s letters, is also worth a visit.

– Ma Bo’le’s second life” (5), a very special translation work:

This book is the last novel of the author who, before her death in Hong Kong, had published nine chapters. The book was translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, who completed it by adding eight more chapters and an introduction/conclusion, which takes place in 1984.

H. Goldblatt is a famous translator, he has translated about 60 Chinese novels and in the United States, the publishers consider that he is better known than the authors he translates and that this can be a guarantee to attract the reader.

His approach has upset some academics and translators. He sees his role as making novels acceptable to the American public. This can go a long way, for example in 2005, his abridged translation of Mo Yan’s novel “Big breasts, wide hips”, (825 pages in French (6) by Noël and Liliane Dutrait) does not exceed 240 pages in English. But he mentions as support Mo Yan’s approach, which states in substance “translation is your work and not mine, it is your responsibility”.

H. Goldblatt plays an essential role in making Chinese literature known in English-speaking countries and he is to a large extent responsible for the success of Xiao Hong. He translated most of her works and in 1976 wrote her biography. In 1980, he met Xiao Jun, the first husband, and in Harbin and Hulan, interviewed some of those who had known Xiao Hong. He even went so far as to translate a collection of short stories by Duanmu Honglian (7), her second husband. For Goldblatt, Xiao Hong is, along with Lao She, one of the essential writers of the first part of the 20th century.

When Goldblatt translated the book, he did not expect to find a publisher for an unfinished nine-chapter novel by a then little-known Chinese writer. So he decided to add eight chapters by making Ma Bo’le and his family reside in the cities where Xiao Hong herself had lived during the Japanese invasion.

He invented an introduction and a conclusion where, in 1984, David, Ma Bo’le’s son, had to give an opinion on a manuscript recovered by the Hong Kong Historical Society, the title and author of which are unknown but which they wished to publish, stating that Ma Bo’le “was a coward even before the war”. This made David strongly react, and he finally got the book qualified as “work of fiction”.

All this fiction does not help much. The chapters written by Goldblatt are of good quality; he does not try to imitate the style of the novelist, his descriptions are more fluid, more supported by historical or literary references. His fiction additions can be justified and altogether it is a pleasure to read.

The question remains: is this a novel by Xiao Hong and is the publication, as in China, of the first nine chapters not sufficient, especially since Xiao Hong describes Ma Bo’le’s personality and the characteristics of his family with great care?

– Ma Bo’le, an anti-hero:

The novel mocks the patriotism of the time; Xiao Hong dissociates writing and politics, doesn’t write, like so many others, anti-Japanese literature, which perhaps explains why her book was received without much excitement.

Women are at the centre of her work, most often herself; here the hero is a man, a character she wants to make an archetype of, like Lu Xun with Ah Q.

Realism, from which she is very far, was the official doctrine at the time; moreover, Ma Bo’le is a satire full of humour, a sort of picaresque novel. Ma Bo’le is the eldest son from a wealthy family in Qingdao. His father is a Christian and has given his descendants Western names, sometimes in an approximate way: Ma Bo’le’s daughter is called Jacob! Praise for the West, wearing Western clothes, studying English, praying and studying the Bible, these are the instructions for those around him.

Ma Bo’le has failed the university entrance exam. He lives with his wife and three children at his father’s house and has to ask his father for money. He claims he is willing to work and goes to Shanghai to set up a publishing house. His father’s money is quickly spent without any books being published.

The return home was difficult but with the Japanese aggression in June 1937, he returned to Shanghai convinced that Qingdao will be occupied. Living in poverty like a refugee, “his sadness had begun the day he was born…he gave the impression that life was little more than submitting to adversity” (p.97).

His wife joins him with the children and some money. They flee the Japanese advance in cities where Xiao Hong stayed: Nanjing, Hankou, Wuchang, Chongqing. A few vague ideas of activity but “soon he reverted to his old habit of sitting at home and brooding” (p. 181).

He observed troop movements and sometimes wanted to become a soldier, but this was not very attractive and, moreover, “with all the, time he spent watching these soldiers, he could almost be considered one of them” (p.179).

The family’s journey comes to an end, as does Xiao Hong’s life, in Hong Kong, which is occupied by the Japanese in December 1941. H. Goldblatt then details the fate of the various members and thus “completes” the novel.

Bertrand Mialaret

(1) Xiao Hong, “Land of Life and Death”, translated into French by Catherine Vignal and Simone Cross-Morea, Panda , 1987.

(2) Xiao Hong, “A rememberance of Lu Xun”, published in 1940 and translated by Howard Goldblatt, released in the spring 1981 issue of the magazine “Renditions” (p.168 to 191).

 http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/pdf/e_outputs/b15/v15p169.pdf   .

(3) “Memories of Hulan He” with illustrations by Hou Guoliang (already published in China); a version “translated” by Gregory Mordaga and “adapted” by Antoine Trouillard.

(4) Xiao Hong, “Tales of the Hulan River”, translated by Simone Cross-Morea, You Feng Publishing, bilingual Chinese French, 2011, 440 pages. The novel was also translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, “Tales of Hulan River”, Joint Publishing Hong Kong, 1988.

(5) Xiao Hong, “Ma Bo’le’s second life”, translated, “edited and completed” by Howard Goldblatt, Open Letter, 2018, 250 pages.

(6) Mo Yan, “Beaux Seins, Belles Fesses”, translated into French by Noël and Liliane Dutrait, Le Seuil 2004.

(7) Duanmu Hongliang, “Red Light”, translated by Howard Goldblatt; Panda 1988.

Nearly thirty years after her death, she remains a celebrity in China and Taiwan; a million followers on her Weibo account. Her best-known book “Stories of the Sahara” (1) has just been translated into English. A huge success in 1976 and ten million copies sold after a serial publication by the Taiwanese newspaper “United Daily News”.

Her memory attracts Chinese tourists, even to El Aaiun, the capital of the former Spanish Sahara, where she lived for three years with her husband José. In El Aaiun, there is a hotel, the San Mao Sahara, and in the Canary Islands, Sanmao tours are organized as well as a visit to the tomb of her husband José Maria Quero.

Similarly, in China, in Dinghai (Zhejiang), in the islands near Ningbo, a museum is dedicated to him where you can admire the camel skull that José gave her as a wedding gift. The Dinghai district even organized a Sanmao literary prize.

However, she is no longer the absolute reference for young Chinese women dazzled by her audacity, her love stories and especially her travels. More than 50 countries, which was exceptional in the 1980s, is no longer so amazing for the younger generation. Nevertheless, her very romantic existence makes her a unique personality.

– Studies and travels all over the world:

Chen Mao-Ping was born in 1943 in Chongqing to a Christian family from Zhejiang province; her father was a lawyer and she had one sister and two brothers. She took the pen name Sanmao in reference to the little character of Zhang Leping. In English, she was known as Echo or Echo Chan after the nymph of the Greek mythology.

In 1949, the family moved to Taiwan where Sanmao had difficulties with the very strict educational system. She reads a lot, Chinese literature but also Western literature. Following catastrophic results in mathematics, she stops school. Her father taught her literature and English and recruited a teacher, the painter Gu Fusheng, who encouraged her passion for literature.

A year of philosophy at the Taipei university and already at the age of nineteen, she began to publish. Then for four years, studies in Madrid, Germany and Chicago, with many travels and trips. She returned to Taiwan for a year where she taught but returned to Spain in 1972.

She meets again José Maria Quero, whom she had known when he was only sixteen years old. He is now a graduate and has done his military service. Sanmao wants to live in the Sahara, José finds a job with the phosphate mines of Boukraa, 50 kilometers north of the Spanish Sahara capital, El Aaiun, where they will rent a house; they will marry there in 1974.

– Sanmao and the Sahara:

“Stories of the Sahara” includes about twenty very different texts: the couple’s daily life in El Aaiun, their travels in the Sahara, their neighbours, how Sanmao became a teacher and a nurse in this feudal society, the troubles of 1975-1976, at the end of their stay.

El Aaiun, the capital, was founded in the 1930s after the discovery of groundwater. A small town for trade and Spanish colonial administration. They rent a house outside the centre, arrange it and furnish it with talent even if periodically goats jump from the roof into their accommodation.

Samao, independent and vigorously feminist, is also an interior woman. She feeds José very well sometimes with products shipped by her mother. “Married life is all about eating. The rest of the time is spent making money in order to eat. There really isn’t much more to it” (p.21).

But at the time, for her readers, a woman who married a foreigner, who lived in the desert far from her family and who had no children, was an exceptional transgression of social norms.

Few contacts with colonial life outside José’s colleagues. Almost no television and some newspapers with a lot of delay. She reads, writes and does not really complain about the monotony or the climate. Travelling is a great pleasure; “there is no other place in the world like the Sahara. This land demonstrates its majesty and tenderness only to those who love it” (p.332). They also sometimes go to the rocky and steep coast to fish and collect mussels and abalones.

Apart from a 2000 km honeymoon, these are short tours because José has very few holidays. They’re looking for fossils in the desert. José is caught in quicksand, a scary story (Night in the wasteland) where she is pursued by three Sahrawis.

Neighbours are an essential part of daily life. Sanmao has an ambiguous attitude; she constantly complains about their body odour because the Sahrawis hardly wash themselves. For the nomads, a bath every three or four years! But her door is always open, the neighbours and their children are at home all the time to borrow something, try on her clothes, chat… José is asked to repair the electricity in the neighbourhood… But when, in turn, they need a hand, the doors close.

She is very sensitive to the poverty of women, especially outside the city, to their disastrous state of health. There’s no way they are letting a male doctor examine them. She becomes a nurse, distributes medicines but José is against her acting as a midwife.

It is a feudal society. The marriage of her neighbour’s very young daughter, decided by her father and brother, the dowry to pay, the festivities, the wedding night, all this revolts her. Slavery remains present, she tells us in “The mute slave”, the story of a black slave and his family. Tribal leaders are the largest owners. The situation has improved, but slavery is still reported nowadays in the Sahrawi camps of Tindouf.

– A book which deserves to be famous:

A book that can be read easily even without knowledge of Chinese literature or Spanish Sahara. No scientific, historical or ethnological claims. The author of the preface, Sharlene Teo, a Singaporean novelist who has just published a good novel “Ponti” (2), quotes Sanmao “when I began to write, I decided to faithfully record the life of ordinary people whose voice go unheard”. Everyday life can be exceptional.

A very pleasant style, she almost speaks to us in the ear as a friend. Some descriptions, without emphasis, underline her love for the Sahara. She specifies her ideas, her dislikes, her revolts but without trying to convince the reader or to develop ideological or political presuppositions. She also has a lot of humour and the cultural ambiguities with José or the Sahrawis are often very pleasing. A great breath in this book, the desire for freedom.

– The 1975-1976 unrest and their departure:

The independence of Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania led these three countries to want to share the Spanish Sahara, becoming attractive with its large phosphate reserves. The first independence movements were created in the 1970s. Eleven people died in El Aayun; Mohammed El Basri, the leader, was murdered in prison.

In Lemseyed, a small oasis, Spanish soldiers are slaughtered in their sleep. Only one survivor, Sergeant Salva, who, too drunk, had not returned to the camp. A splendid text on this sergeant (p.246) where Sanmao recounts in a few pages, the events of the time.

The historical references are very limited, which can be embarrassing because she uses historical characters in a fictional way; for example in “Crying camels”, Bassiri reappears as the leader of the independentists and husband of Shahida, a nurse persecuted because she is Catholic. They were killed, in the book, by the Sahrawis in 1975.

Sanmao and José left the Sahara for the Canary Islands early 1975. Madrid was not an option because the relationship with her mother-in-law is rather complex. This has not created any difficulties between them and the book is a continuous love letter to José even if she highlights his defects, his weaknesses and their cultural differences.

 José’s death in 1979 during a dive was a disaster. She returns to her parents’ house and then moves again to the Canaries.

In 1981, after six months in Latin America for the United Daily News newspaper, she successfully taught at the university in Taipei and published a lot: travel stories, fiction, translations, scripts… A Yim Ho film “Red Dust”, in 1990 with Maggy Cheung and Brigit Lin, was a great success.

Famous songs, including “L’olivier”, sung by Chyi Yu https://youtu.be/LZb8fJZFhlo and for which the translated text can be found (https://supchina.com/2019/04/07/friday-song-chyi-yu-the-olive-tree-san-mao/).                                        

The last few years will be bleak because of cancer. She committed suicide at the Taipei hospital in January 1991. “In this life, I’d always felt I wasn’t part of the world around me, I often needed to go off the tracks of a normal life and do things without explanation” (p.171).

Bertrand Mialaret

(1) Sanmao,’Stories of the Sahara’, translated by Mike Fu, Bloomsbury 2019, 390 pages.

(2) Sharlene Teo,’Ponti’, Picador 2018, 290 pages.

Jean François Billeter is a well-known Swiss sinologist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva. Some of his books are references such as “The Chinese Art of Writing” (1), which has been translated into English, studies on Zhuangzi (2), an essay on the contemporary history of China, “China three times silenced” (3). Other books deal with philosophy, politics, translation; the sinologist even becomes a polemist in his excellent “Contre François Jullien” (4), the famous French sinologist and philosopher.

This is why two recent books have left their mark on people’s minds, “Une rencontre à Pékin” (5) and “Une autre Aurélia” (6), a tribute to his wife Wen, who died in 2012. He met Wen and her sister in Beijing at the home of Mrs Li who, having retained her Swiss nationality, was allowed to receive foreigners.

After studying in Basel and then Geneva, J.F. Billeter decided, without enthusiasm, in 1962, to study Chinese in Paris at Langues O. He continued his studies in Beijing in 1963, then in September 1964 at the Faculty of Arts of the Beijing University on a Swiss scholarship (diplomatic relations had existed between Switzerland and China since 1950). Intensive studies but he is completely cut off from Chinese life.

Wen is a doctor and has been working for a year in the small hospital of a factory; she was born in Beijing, the sixth in a family of seven children. They manage to meet again but the police intervene and tell Wen that they must either stop seeing each other or get married. While they hardly know each other, they decide to overcome all obstacles.

– The private sphere is State business:

At the time, in China, no one could get married without the authorization of their work unit, a “letter of introduction”; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is delaying the decision but the Swiss ambassador introduces the two lovers to Marshal Chen Yi, Minister of Foreign Affairs. They continue to meet but are followed by plainclothes police officers and the police explains to Wen that her fiancé is a foreign agent.

China is on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, a period brilliantly described by the Taiwanese author Chen Ruoxi (7) whom J.F. Billeter, rightly, admires very much. “The regime maintained with all the means of its propaganda a real paranoia: the class struggle was merciless, the enemy was everywhere, the one from the outside too…” (p.52).

They are finally allowed to marry, but Wen has to leave the hospital of her telecommunications company. The parents are informed of the marriage and at first are not happy. Wen gets a one-year leave and they can go to Switzerland where she obtains the dual nationality that China then recognized.

A first return to Beijing in 1975 to advance his thesis on Li Zhi, but the universities are closed; they will settle in Japan in Kyoto for two years. The thesis progresses and a little boy is born. Visas for China are not granted. Wen’s family has suffered a lot, her father is forced to sweep the streets wearing a yellow star, then he suffers from hemiplegia.

Many years later, Wen’s second brother gave them a note book about the family’s history, about the military career of her father, a follower of Chiang Kai-shek, but especially close to Zhang Xueliang, the “young marshal” who arrested Chiang and forced him to accept a united front against Japan. Wen’s family, very prosperous for a long time, lived with great difficulty in the 1960s and the situation will worsen with the persecution of the Red Guards, which the book describe in detail (pp. 130-134).

New misfortunes, her younger sister died in 1976 in the Tangshan earthquake and its 250,000 victims. Her mother died in 1977 and her father two years later. In general we don’t talk much about recent history, it remains unspoken, we don’t learn from it and events over time are forgotten, erasing the past which is what the regime wants.

– Absence and presence:

Wen died in November 2012; for a few months J.F. Billeter filled notebooks and wondered if the experience of grief could be shared and if he could suggest to others that they learn something from it. A small book “Une autre Aurélia” completes the first book.

No details about Wen, no anecdotes but thoughts about absence and presence. “Remembrance is the beginning of a presence that is formed in us. Nothing interrupts this development, this interruption causes astonishment. I have found a way to avoid it: accept the emerging memory as a form of presence without adding the idea of absence” (p. 18).

You have to refuse the word mourning, “the sinister vocabulary of death, of loss…now makes me horror…It prescribes to me the emotional value I’m supposed to give to my emotion. It deprives me of the freedom to interpret it as I see it or to let it be transformed” (p. 26)

As the author says, it is a book on emotion, “we don’t choose our emotions but we choose how to interpret them”. J.F. Billeter points out that he “is beginning to imagine our adventure from her point of view. That’s something that Proust did not mention”.

“Aurelia”, is it an adapted title? Wen has nothing to do with the actress Jenny Colon, Aurelia’s heroine, and J.F. Billeter is far from Gérard de Nerval and his fits of madness. Certainly Doctor Blanche, the doctor who treated G. de Nerval, had understood the therapeutic value that writing can have and had pushed him to write “Aurelia”. “Another Aurelia”, this great book, is perhaps also a form of therapy…

Bertrand Mialaret

(1) Jean François Billeter, “L’art chinois de l’écriture”, Skira, Geneva, 1989, 320 pages.

(2) Jean François Billeter, “Etudes sur le Tchouang-tseu”, Editions Allia, 2006, 290 pages.

(3) Jean François Billeter, “China three times silenced”, Editions Allia, 2000, 148 pages.

(4) Jean François Billeter, “Contre François Jullien”, Editions Allia, 2006, 122 pages.

(5) Jean François Billeter, “Une rencontre à Pékin”, Editions Allia, 2017, 150 pages.

(6) Jean François Billeter, “Une autre Aurélia”, Editions Allia, 2017, 92 pages.

(7) Chen Jo-Hsi, “Le Préfet Yin”, introduction and translation by Simon Leys. Denoel Publishing 1980, 270 pages.

English translation by Nancy Ing and Howard Goldblatt, Indiana University Press, 1979, 220 pages.

Tash Aw is the most famous Malaysian novelist; he was born in Taipei in 1973 and lived in Kuala Lumpur before studying law in Cambridge and working for a few years with a lawyer. He lives in London and currently in Paris for a few months.

Three of his novels written in English are translated into French. The first one gave him immediate international fame and a record advance fee. At the beginning of 2008, I was able to highlight the qualities of this book (1). The next one, “The Invisible World Map” (2) was an interesting reading about Sukarno’s Jakarta; however, “The Five Star Billionaire” (3) made me run away. Not for very long, because I was won over by a short autobiographical essay (4) and by a remarkable novel, “We, the Survivors” (5), that has just been published.

– “The Survivors”, racial tensions and social inequalities:

Ah Hock comes from a poor family of Malaysians of Chinese origin, the father, a fisherman, left for Singapore and abandoned his mother. She works at a fishmonger’s but decides to return to her village and successfully grows vegetables with her son for a few years. A typhoon destroys everything, “we were the wrong race, the wrong religion, who was going to give us any help? Not the government that’s for sure” (p.202).

In KL, Ah Hock worked as a waiter in a restaurant and then in a fish farm for ten years and became the boss’ foreman. He marries Jenny Teoh, who is pursuing a marketing career in an American company. He rarely sees Keong, a childhood friend, who has become a drug dealer and a middleman for the employment of immigrant workers, who are often illegal.

Indonesian fish farm workers catch cholera; he asks Keong to help him hire other immigrants. A fight with the negotiator, an emigrant from Bangladesh, went sour and Ah Hock killed him by accident to protect Keong. After three years in prison, he was contacted by Su Min, who was studying in the United States and wanted to write an interview book on Ah Hock’s itinerary.

– Migrants in Malaysia:

Very imprecise figures, but probably 15% of the working population. Of the 3.5 million migrants, at least 1.3 million are in an illegal situation. They come from Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines; they work in the states of Selangor and Johore but also in Sabah and Sarawak, employed in industry, construction, plantations and services.

The novel emphasizes racist reactions, “no one wanted to know about you if you were dark skinned or foreign” (p.10). For Lai, the boss of the fish farm or Keong, these immigrants are just underpaid numbers who are there to do the hardest work: “it wasn’t the pay that destroyed the spirits of those men and women, it was the work, the way it broke their bodies” (p.44); suicides happen quite often.

For the author, today’s Chinese Malaysians are actually doing to migrants what their grandparents suffered when they arrived in Malaysia during the colonial period.

– Social inequalities:

In Malaysia, the focus is on race and inequality in relation to Malay privileges. In fact, there has been a significant increase in social differences during a single generation. These inequalities are greater than in Europe but less than in Singapore or the Philippines. One thought that the future would bring a better life for a richer, more educated population, this is less sure today.

Ah Hock’s life shows us this development; despite his efforts and sense of responsibility, his bosses, of Chinese origin, did nothing for him; poorly paid, rather small bonuses, few prospects.

These themes are also developed in “Strangers on the Pier“, a great autobiographical essay. Tash Aw can’t get his father to talk about the past. The grandparents come from Fujian and Hainan. They are immigrants; one cannot talk about their weaknesses and poverty, which is a handicap, must be hidden as much as possible.

It is at the end of school that children really perceive the class differences and the very diverse futures that await them. As a teenager, Tash Aw, who spends his holidays in the village of his maternal grandparents, felt that he is moving away from the rest of the family, that he risks becoming a stranger.

– “The Survivors”, a successful novel:

We appreciate the tone of the book, sometimes some distance, sometimes a little sadness; obvious stylistic qualities. It is a very elaborate novel, as the author says: “writing is a craft and a vocation…I have always believed in giving the writing the respect it deserves”. A book that the author obviously cares about.

The composition is complex; the introductory chapter is a summary of the book’s plot. We play between the past and the present, between the hero’s youth, his life as a married man and a foreman, his interviews with Su Min after his years in prison; there is no chronological progression.

The character of Su Min is too present, she is a trendy young woman, a student in the United States, vegan and lesbian; she is the opposite of Ah Hock. But she has a personality which is not really interesting and who serves as an interlude in the book. Only one point deserves attention: as an interviewer, she takes control; the book to be published is in fact her own, Ah Hock is only the support.

Ah Hock is an endearing character, a friendly murderer. In fact, murder is much less important to the author than his reflection on the life of his hero. Ah Hock doesn’t feel involved in this murder, nor in the verdict. He does not remember Ashadul’s face and it was in court that he learned his name. It is not surprising to learn that Tash Aw is an admirer of Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”.

The characters are sometimes a little weak, for example Keong, the hero’s childhood friend and evil genius. Similarly, one can regret that the tempo of the second half of the novel is less sustained than that of the beginning.

 It is also surprising that the Malays hardly appear in the book while claims for economic equality with Chinese citizens have been the cause of conflicts and discrimination that still exist.

 But Tash Aw knows how to approach serious problems with nuance and without a hidden agenda. He has written with talent an honest novel that makes us experience with pleasure and from the inside some of the most serious problems of Malaysia.

Bertrand Mialaret

1- Tash Aw, “Le Tristement célèbre Johny Lim” (translation of “The Harmony Silk Factory”!) Robert Laffont, August 2006, 420 pages.

2- Tash Aw, “La carte du monde invisible”, translated by A. Neuhoff, Robert Laffont January 2012, 444 pages.

3- 3- Tash Aw, “A Five Star Billionaire”, translated by J.F. Hel Guedj, Robert Laffont, September 2015, 448 pages.

4- Tash Aw, “The Face, Strangers on a Pier”, Restless Books, 2016, 78 pages.

5- Tash Aw, “We, the Survivors”, Fourth Estate, 2019, 326 pages.