China's Avant-Garde Fiction: An Anthology

by Jing Wang (Editor), Howard Goldblatt (Translation), Eva Shan Chou (Translation)

Filled with mirages, hallucinations, myths, mental puzzles, and the fantastic, the contemporary experimental fiction of the Chinese avant-garde represents a genre of storytelling unlike any other. Whether engaging the worn spectacle of history, expressing seemingly unmotivated violence, or reinventing outlandish Tibetan myths, these stories are defined by their devotion to theatrics and their willful apathy toward everything held sacred by the generation that witnessed the Cultural Revolution.
Jing Wang has selected provocative examples of this new school of writing, which gained prominence in the late 1980s. Contradicting many long-cherished beliefs about Chinese writers—including the alleged tradition of writing as a political act against authoritarianism—these stories make a dramatic break from conventions of modern Chinese literature by demonstrating an irreverence toward history and culture and by celebrating the artificiality of storytelling. Enriched by the work of a distinguished group of translators, this collection presents an aesthetic experience that may have outraged many revolutionary-minded readers in China, but one that also occupies an important place in the canon of Chinese literature. China’s Avant-Garde Fiction brings together a group of exceptional writers (including Raise the Red Lantern author Su Tong) to the attention of an English-speaking audience.
This book will be enjoyed by those interested in Chinese literature, culture, and society—particularly readers of contemporary fiction.

Contributors. Bei Cun, Can Xue, Gei Fei, Ma Yuan, Su Tong, Sun Ganlu, Yu Hua

Translators. Eva Shan Chou, Michael S. Duke, Howard Goldblatt, Ronald R. Janssen, Andrew F. Jones, Denis C. Mair, Victor H. Mair, Caroline Mason, Beatrice Spade, Kristina M. Torgeson, Jian Zhang, Zhu Hong

Genres: China, Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

296 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 1998

About the author

Jing Wang is Professor of Chinese media and Cultural Studies and S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language & Culture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is jointly appointed to MIT's Comparative Media Studies and Global Studies & Languages.

Jing Wang is the founder and organizer of MIT’s New Media Action Lab. In spring 2009, Professor Wang launched an NGO2.0 in collaboration with four Chinese universities including the University of Science and Technology of China, two Chinese NGOs, and corporate partners including Ogilvy & Mather China and Milward Brown. The project, funded by Ford Foundation in Beijing, is designed to enhance the digital and new media literacy of grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China and deliver an interactive mapping platform built on Ushihidi, complete with Web 2.0 training courses and a Chinese field guide to best practices and software of social media for nonprofits.

Professor Wang started working with Creative Commons in 2006 and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board of Creative Commons Mainland China. She was appointed to serve on the Advisory Board for Wikimedia Foundation in 2010. She serves on the editorial and advisory boards of ten academic journals in the US, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the UK, which include journals such as Global Media and Communication; Advertising & Society Review; positions: east Asia cultures critique; Chinese Journal of Communication; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal: Movements; The Chinese Journal of Communication and Society, etc.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An esoteric and eccentric set of short stories.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the introduction describes it, the avant-garde period in Chinese fiction was relatively short, with most of the production between the years 1987 and 1989. The avant-garde fiction was marked by a turn from politically focused literature towards a more experimental, literature-for-literature's approach. Most of the stories in this collection have an element of ambiguity and uncertainty, a calling into question of the very nature of narrative. The first two stories, both from Ge Fei, are investigations, the first ("Remembering Mr. Wu You") a murder mystery, the second ("Green Yellow") a historical investigation, which only become more puzzling the farther the searcher enters into them.

One other element running through many stories is violence, sometimes quite savage in nature. Yu Hua's "1986" tells of a man obsessed by the violence of China's ancient past and broken by the violence of its recent past, and his reenactment of that same violence. Bei Cun's "The Big Drugstore" spins its tale of an herbalist's shop into nightmarish dimensions. Su Tong's fiction resembles Ge Fei's in its irresolvable mysteries, but in "The Brothers Shu" also gives us a boy giving rein to his savage side.

The collection finishes off with a handful of stories that evoke the modern crafter of labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges. Sun Ganlu's "I Am a Young Drunkard" makes allusion to the "blind Argentinean" before going on to tell of the narrator's encounter with an old poet, a tale quite poetic in itself. Ma Yuan's "A Wandering Spirit" begins with an epigraph from Borges, then proceeds to a twisting narrative where truths collide.

[Alika]

I SO wanted to like this collection, but had a hard time with it. Overall I felt like I was missing something, either culturally, politically, or...? It's also got to be hard to accurately translate experimental stuff from Chinese into Engligh. Still, my faves were "1986" and "Green Yellow" and maybe "The Big Drugstore." I did not like "Whistling" which totally bored the hell out of me.