Story Club

Discussion: Pain

China Channel

Chen Xiwo answers questions on his agonizing story

Editor’s note: In January we republished the story ‘Pain’ by controversial Chinese writer Chen Xiwo. If you haven’t read this brilliant and thought-provoking short story already, we advise you do so now, as below Chen answers questions from readers and our editorial team, alongside the story’s translator Nicky Harman and its publisher Harvey Thomlinson. If you’re curious to read more, buy Chen’s collection in translation, The Book of Sins. - Alec Ash

Chen Xiwo: Interpersonal relations matter in China. Modernity’s break with tradition was incomplete and old ways persist, so China is still a society based on interpersonal relations. That’s ‘interpersonal’ and not ‘human’ relations. Human relations are intimate, while interpersonal relations are instrumental. This is one root of China’s current moral crisis, which is far from just a modern malaise. Even where there’s love, there’s a dearth of deep communication. Did you notice that my protagonist is an only child? China’s lack of mutual understanding was made more acute by the one-child policy.

Q&A

Let Not-Knowing Push You Somewhere New

Urvashi Bahuguna

Urvashi Bahuguna interviews poet Chen Chen

Urvashi Bahuguna: The back of your book lists the categories POETRY / ASIAN AMERICAN / LGBTQ. How do you respond to being referred to as an Asian American poet or a queer poet?

Chen Chen: I embrace these labels because I think it’s important to be specific about the experiences and histories from which I’m writing. I want to question the supposed universality of work that doesn’t label itself by specific identity markers. Why doesn’t work about middle class white people in suburbia announce itself as such? Like: POETRY / MIDDLE CLASS WHITE PEOPLE / SUBURBIA / A LOT OF OBSERVATIONS ABOUT BIRDS PROBABLY. But that kind of writing typically just gets categorized as poetry, plain poetry. The assumption is that work like mine operates within a narrower landscape. But I want to show how expansive and messy and strange writing out of or in response to these particular categories can be.

Chinese Corner

Of Rice Bunnies and Grass-Mud Horses

Anne Henochowicz

Punning the system – Anne Henochowicz

How do you say  #MeToo in Mandarin? Not how you might expect: it’s all about the rice bunny.

This cute mascot is a linguistic response to a very uncute situation. The first Mandarin variations on the #MeToo hashtag to appear at the end of 2017 include the direct translation #Wǒyěshì (#我也是#) as well as #MeTooinChina (#WǒyěshìzàiZhōngguó #我也是在中国#). Of the many women who came forward to share their stories, one drew particular attention: a graduate student whose former doctoral advisor had tried to force himself on her posted her story anonymously to the Quora-esque site Zhihu in October. In the new year, she republished her story under her real name on Weibo. Shortly after Luo Xixi’s post went viral, her advisor, Chen Xiaowu, lost his job. Women were heartened and #MeTooinChina gained momentum, speaking out about the harassment they have suffered on campus and in the workplace and circulating petitions for their universities to address the issue head-on. Unfortunately, China’s party-state apparatus pounces at any hint of a social movement. Soon women soon found their stories and petitions had been deleted, while #MeToo posts disappeared from search results.

Reviews

How the Chinese became Christians

Ting Guo

Ting Guo reviews Jennifer Lin’s Shanghai Faithful

Legendary preacher and religious rebel Watchman Nee is often thought of simply as someone who denounced denominationalism as a sin and advocated a radical separation from Western missions. When viewed through the personal lens of his grand-niece Jennifer Lin, he becomes something very different: a fashionable young man who loved racecars, was a world-traveler, and collected Life Magazine and Reader’s Digest.

Jennifer Lin starts her book with a question: how did the Lin family become Christians? She begins with her great great-grandfather, who worked as a cook for a household of Anglican missionaries in Fuzhou, the affluent capital of Fujian province. Following the defeat of the Qing in the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, Fuzhou became one of a handful of “treaty ports” where Westerners were given special privileges to trade and prosthelytize. The cook’s son — Lin’s great grandfather — proved particularly bright, and received a modern education that changed his life. He became a doctor, allowing his son, Lin Pu-chi — Lin’s grandfather — to attend St. John’s University in Shanghai. At St. John’s, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Republic of China who “stirred the hearts of the Chinese people like no one before” spoke to Lin Pu-chi’s class. “The basis of a democratic country is education,” the revolutionary said. “Give unto others what you have received,” Sun exhorted the students. “Let your light shine.”

Essays

The Coldest Winter in Hong Kong

Aaron Mc Nicholas

The geopolitics of a film banned – Aaron Mc Nicholas

In early 1981, a virulent anti-communist film produced in Kuomintang-controlled Taiwan passed inspection by Hong Kong’s film censors for public screenings in the city. In reaching their decision, the censors reasoned that the film covered the Cultural Revolution, which was an historical episode “now condemned as much in China as elsewhere” and the film avoided direct criticism of past or present Chinese leaders. Therefore, there were not sufficient grounds to block the film being shown in Hong Kong.

Such a decision would have been unthinkable for much of Hong Kong’s colonial history. As much as the current generation of Hong Kongers discusses the effect of measures such as the National Anthem Law on freedom of expression, the city’s creative space has never been able to escape geopolitical constraints when it comes to sensitive topics. And there was no doubt that The Coldest Winter in Peking was a piece of political propaganda, produced by Taiwan’s government-run film studio with the aim of painting an unflattering picture of life on the mainland under the Communist bandits.