Kevin McGeary, Author at China Channel

Kevin McGeary reviews a new story collection, The Book of Shanghai

In 2019, the Globe and Mail published an op-ed titled ‘Welcome to Shanghai: Capital of the Future.’ In it, the author describes his experience of visiting the city as like “walking through the looking glass into the future.” Citing the city’s “muscular” building strategy, colossal scale, citizens’ entrepreneurial energy, and (of course) China’s ancient history, much of the article would not have been out of place in The Global Times. While he says London and New York are “the world’s current leading cities,” some of his arguments as to why Shanghai is primed to overtake them are strong.

Yet fiction leaves more room for exploring the conflict between how a city sees itself and how the world sees it. At its best, literature can capture both the appealing and the abhorrent aspects of a particular time and place. As editor Jin Li mentions in his introduction to a new collection of fiction based in the city, The Book of Shanghai, unlike Beijing, Xi’an or nearby Hangzhou, Shanghai did not become a major city until after the first Opium War when the colonial powers used it as a port. From its hey-day in the 1920s, Shanghai was an important hub through which an ancient culture entered the modern world.

Q&A

Translating Reform Era Fiction

February 12, 2020February 14, 2020 Kevin McGeary

Kevin McGeary talks to the translator of Empires of Dust by Jiang Zilong

Set in the fictional village of Guojiadian, Jiang Zilong’s Empires of Dust is a seven-hundred page tome that chronicles the rise and fall of Guo Cunxian, who transforms from impoverished peasant to formidable businessman. Described by the South China Morning Post as being “as epic, grandiose, ambitious, complex and turbulent as China itself,” this is the tenth novel by Jiang, who is often described as the father of China’s ‘reform literature,’ literature dealing with the reform and opening period after 1978. I caught up with co-translator Christopher Payne to discuss the novel, and the work involved in rendering it into English.

Of all the characters, Guo Cunxian goes through the biggest trajectory, from rejecting the sexual advances of Sister Liu to habitually committing infidelity, from eking out a living making coffins to becoming powerful and corrupt. Does he represent both the heroic and reprehensible qualities that made China’s economic boom possible?

Guo has very humble roots. His family did not participate in the Communist revolution – so no Red history to claim as their own – nor did they join up with the Party to become cadres or other revolutionary workers after 1949. They were the quintessential poor peasant family.

Q&A

Translating Tibetan Literature

May 28, 2019May 29, 2019 Kevin McGeary

Kevin McGeary talks to Tsering Döndrup’s translator, Christopher Peacock

Christopher Peacock is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, and translator from the Tibetan of The Handsome Monk and Other Stories, a collection of fiction by Tsering Döndrup. Born in 1961 in Qinghai, a Tibetan area of China, Döndrup began writing in the early 1980s and has published many collections of short fiction and four full-length novels. His work has been translated into several languages, and he is the recipient of a number of Tibetan, Mongolian and nationwide literary prizes in China. I talked to Christopher Peacock about Döndrup’s work and the state of Tibetan literature.

How did you become involved with Tsering Döndrup and The Handsome Monk?

Initially, because I was researching his short story ‘Ralo.’ I was aware that several Tibetan critics had compared it to Lu Xun’s ‘The True Story of Ah Q,’ and this fit very closely with my interest in Tibetan adaptations of Chinese literary discourse. I interviewed the author about the story, and later I translated it for my own use. As I read more of his work, I became interested in putting together a whole collection.

Hidden History

How Japan Tried to Save Thousands of Jews from the Holocaust

March 28, 2019March 31, 2019 Kevin McGeary

The plan for a Jewish settlement in Japanese-occupied China – Kevin McGeary

A number of events have happened in the last few years to suggest that we might be returning to the 1930s, the last great period of darkness in Western political history. Yet a little-known tale from World War II involves a dispute between Japan and Germany, two of the 20th century’s biggest partners in war crime. Japan’s campaign to populate Manchuria with Jewish refugees, many of whom were fleeing the Nazis, was marketed as a humanitarian project, but many of the officials behind it would be executed as war criminals after Japan’s 1945 surrender. Its backstory is even more bizarre than the premise suggests.

Hidden History

Republican China’s Most Mysterious Man

March 22, 2019March 21, 2019 Kevin McGeary

An assassin who met a suspicious end – Kevin McGeary

The first half of the 20th century had many characters – T.E. Lawrence springs to mind – who excelled as both men of thought and men of action, living lives that dwarf any author’s imagination. As Orson Welles ad-libbed in The Third Man, there is something about living through the kind of times nobody wants to live through that brings out greatness.

Another such man was Dai Li 戴笠. A genius of military intelligence, Dai (also known as Dai Yunong 戴雨農) was China’s most accomplished assassin during the War of Resistance against Japan. As well as helping Chiang Kai-shek claim the scalps of high-profile enemies and defectors, he also bedded some of the most glamorous women of his day.

After Dai’s death in a plane crash on March 17, 1946, Chiang Kai-shek is known to have rallied his troops by insisting, “Dai Li never died.” His death was indeed mysterious and conveniently timed for those who might have wanted him dead. Several years ago, on the anniversary of his “disappearance,” Xinhua went over the whole story and the various conspiracy theories around the plane crash. However, none are as bizarre as the official history.

Author: Kevin McGeary

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