Granta 169: China

"So, one work I want to draw attention to here, even though I have so far just had a chance to dip into it since I just got my copy, is the special issue of writings from mainland China that Granta has published. Granta 169: China is a kind of collage work, a sort I’m often drawn to about China. Sometimes such works will be made up of profiles of very different individual Chinese people but, in this case, we get a literary collage. It has a story by Yan Lianke who’s thought of as one of the most critical voices in the literary sphere. He lambasts and satirizes various moves the Chinese Communist Party has made, and his works are often banned inside of China. Then there are other writers represented in the collection who work inside the official writers’ organizations or who are not particularly political. You get pieces by writers who had very little schooling and learned to write while they were working in factories, as well as poets and writers who have an almost punk sensibility. Then you also have representations of more refined writing. There is also a lot of attention to how different regions can be in terms of writing. There’s a heavy representation of writers from the Northeast. It’s a way to get out of a Beijing or Shanghai-centric view of China. That’s what I really liked about it. It’s a mix. There are essays. There are a couple of pieces about genres of writing. There’s one reported piece by Han Zhang who is based in New York and has written good pieces, not always related to China, for the New Yorker . There are photo essays sprinkled in, which is quite nice. Some are high-quality color spreads that liven up the book as you’re going through it. The bulk of the volume is translations of short stories and memoirs, that sort of thing. I love Yu Hua’s writing . It was a pleasure to get a new short story by him, “Tomorrow I’ll Get Past It.” It’s translated by Michael Berry, who I admire as a translator as well. It seems autobiographical, except that it’s by a writer who is frustrated by trying to make it, not breaking through for a longer period than it took Yu Hua to do so. You can tell he’s drawing on the experiences he had as a young writer and then as an older one. I especially like “Adrift in the South,” a memoir by Xiao Hai that is translated by Tony Hao, neither of them people I was familiar with but whose names I will now look for as a reader. It’s about somebody who shows up in Shenzhen and works in factories, making his way and stumbling into a life as a writer. It’s earthy in style and evocative of a world of low wage and no guarantees labour and of drifting from factory to factory. It’s a love letter to Shenzhen. It’s not as though any experience he had there was so great, but it was crucial as a coming-of-age period for him. I describe it as a memoir, but in it genres bleed into each other and he even includes some stanzas from poems that he wrote. One strength of the collection is that it showcases work by many talented translators. Helen Wang, who has done some wonderful translations of children’s literature from China, is represented in it. Jeremy Tiang, a Singapore translator who seems to be everywhere right now and also writes fiction of his own, was a consultant to the volume. There’s an enjoyable interview with the editor of Granta , Thomas Meaney, about the creation of this volume on the Sinica podcast . Kaiser Kuo interviews him and he talks about the creation process of trying to get a different set of voices from China out there. Yes, although I do have to stress that I don’t come close to reading—or even looking at—everything that’s published because there’s an enormous amount. There continue to be interesting works by journalists and various kinds of reportage. Alec Ash has a memoir, The Mountains Are High , about living in Yunnan during COVID. Peter Hessler has a new book, Other Rivers , that’s partly about teaching in Chengdu, decades after he taught as a Peace Corps volunteer in a different part of Sichuan and wrote River Town about that experience. There were also books by Yuan Yang, with a focus on a small group of women, and Ed Wong, with a focus largely on the experiences of his father, which are based on the time they each spent working as journalists in Beijing and traveling around the PRC. The former wrote for the FT for a long time before she went into politics (she was just elected an MP in your country), and the latter wrote in China and still writes for the New York Times (now based in my country in DC). Each of these four books have things to offer. There’s also one coming out next year by a talented journalist, Emily Feng , that I’ve read in proofs and was so taken with that I’d be surprised if I didn’t want to talk to you about it again a year from now if we do a similar interview on 2025 China books. The kind of writing in all these books by journalists is something to watch because there is likely be a gap in quality books by reporters and freelancers who spent extended amounts of time in China and were able to roam around in unstructured ways. Many journalists with long-time China experience either aren’t there now or if they are there, are confined in their movements. 2024 was also an interesting year for accessible academic writing on China, which I’m always glad to see. There are more academics with deep knowledge of China who are either trying to write books for the general reader or at least create crossover works intended for specialist and non-specialist audiences. There was, for example, Tom Mullaney’s Chinese Computer , a sequel to his Chinese Typewriter . It’s a specialist study but it’s very accessible because it tells stories of people involved in the creation of these new technologies. So that’s a good trend. Two of the books that I chose this year are by academics who are moving to a more accessible style of writing: in one case, very fully in that direction."