Xiaokang2020

Each Leaf a Bodhi Tree: My Fifteen Years at Dunhuang (一叶一菩提——我在敦煌十五年, 2010) by Xiao Mo (萧默) is a memoir about the author’s career studying the Buddhist caves at Dunhuang, a fifteen-year period that began in 1963 and lasted until after the Cultural Revolution. I haven’t read it yet (it just arrived this afternoon), but a note at the very end caught my attention:

作者赘言

本稿完成后，有朋友说，你说的这些个“文革”中的事儿，好多年轻人早就不知道了，什么“造反有理”、“横扫一切”、“破四旧”、“无限崇拜”、“三忠于”、“早启示，晚汇报”……等等，现在的年轻人听了都哈哈大笑，以为是笑话，不会懂得，不如加上几条名词解释作为附录。我觉得有理，本来已开始做起来，转而一想，这件事本不该由我来做的，绝对应该是中学历史课本和大学政治课的主要内容之一，我来做，岂非越俎代庖？再说，作者还是对此等事保持点距离为好，要是年轻朋友真想知道，而今互联网发达，一查就能查到；要是不想知道，这整本书他都不会读的，便打消了这个念头。

Superfluous Words From the Author

After completing this manuscript, a friend said, this Cultural Revolution stuff you’re talking about — lots of young people don’t know a thing about it. Things like “to rebel is justified”, “sweep away all [monsters and demons]“, “smash the four olds”, “unlimited worship”, “three loyals”, “morning instruction, evening report”….young people break out laughing when they hear them now, as if they’re a joke. They won’t understand. Why not add an explanation of some of the terms as an appendix? I thought this made sense, and I had already started on it when the thought struck me that it really shouldn’t be my job to do this. It should absolutely be a major part of middle school history textbooks and university politics curriculum, so if I did it, wouldn’t I be meddling in someone else’s affairs? Besides, it’s best for an author to keep some distance from these things. If my young friends want to know, the Internet is quite advanced and they’ll find it if they look for it. If they don’t want to know, then they won’t read this book in the first place. So I gave up the idea.

I’m looking forward to reading it, partly for the history, and partly because Xiao is an interesting, opinionated writer. According to one review, he takes some shots at Gao Er Tai, another Dunhuang researcher with a memoir of those turbulent decades, In Search of My Homeland (寻找家园, 2004).

---

The book A Glossary of Political Terms of the People’s Republic of China by Li Gucheng (Google Books link), which I used for some of the terms Xiao lists, looks like an exceptionally helpful reference for translating texts from the Cultural Revolution era.

Back in October 2009, Evan Osnos of the New Yorker blogged about his experiences filming scenes for a tacky Chinese soap:

In the late afternoon, I taped my scene, which consisted of standing at a pay phone and making a call. I was to ask for a girl, and then nod while I was told she was unavailable. Then I was to hang up and gaze at an apartment window, which was, presumably, hers. My delivery needed work, and it took several takes. Eventually, the crew was satisfied enough to declare victory and hand over my lines for the following day. It was then that I discovered that I would be playing a sexual predator.

He ultimately decided to pull out from the gig, ticking off the producers.

My own non-experience with a Chinese TV production was pretty similar. In 2001 or 2002, when I was teaching at the Northeast Institute of Electric Power in Jilin City, I was invited to appear as a lecherous foreigner in three scenes of a crime drama. Filmed on location in the city, it would focus on the exploits of northeastern mobsters and the police hot on their track. It would be broadcast on local TV, so I’d be seen by all my students. A middle-aged colleague of mine was cast as a foreign bartender in one scene. The character I was to play was part of a trap set by local mobsters, whose boss had wormed his way into a job with the city police. I was to be bait in an attempt to gain evidence to blackmail the heroine, who had gone on the lam for reasons I can no longer recall.

Before they confirmed my participation, they made sure that I was comfortable with appearing shirtless in one scene: the police would burst into my hotel room and arrest me for soliciting a prostitute, and I would have to dress for the occasion.

Decency is a fluid thing — I’d already adjusted my suburban American attitude to the Speedos of Jilin’s public pools and the dress shoes of its mountain pathways — so I decided I didn’t have a problem. Then the script came. It turned out that my dodgy foreigner would first appear in an elevator casting a lustful eye upon the heroine. Later he would come on to her and react with pervy delight when she claimed to be a college student. That was the deal breaker. Due partly to the conduct codes handed out every year while I was an undergrad, and partly to the stereotype that foreign teachers were only in China to score, student-teacher relationships were off-limits as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want to give anyone the wrong impression in a prime-time soap. My colleague also decided to back out.

The casting director was not pleased. He tried to persuade us to reconsider: “It’s just acting.” “We can erase the college student line.” “It’s going to premiere in Yunnan, and it won’t even show in this city.” Eventually he gave up and went to the other big university across town, where he found two other foreign teachers to fill the roles.

The program did end up on Jilin TV, and everyone had fun identifying where everything was shot. The scenes in question came off pretty much as you’d expect, if you’ve ever seen foreign non-actors playing bit parts on Chinese TV.

The only thing I really remember about the show is a scene where a police officer eating hotpot out on the street is taunted by a mobster and for some reason has retrieve his gun from the hotpot dish. By the time he screws up enough courage to dip his hand into the boiling water, the mobster has already turned a corner. I wouldn’t have minded playing a role like that.

additional stories

From Jajia’s twitter feed:

在《炎黄春秋》楼下的一个流动书摊上，看到《墓碑》、《中越战争》及廖亦武的新书，当然都是盗版，老板说生意不错，并说，有次有个老头过来，翻开墓碑扉页的照片，问老板说，你看看我是谁？老板大惊，杨继绳说，没事，盗了就好。

At a book vendor’s cart outside the Yanhuang Chunqiu building I saw Tombstone, The Sino-Vietnamese War, and Liao Yiwu’s latest. All bootlegs, naturally. The vendor said that business was good. He also said that an old man had come by once, flipped open Tombstone to the flyleaf photo, and said, “Guess who I am.” The vendor was shocked. Yang Jisheng said, “No big deal. Pirated — that’s good.”

The short reviews in this post were written in mid-2007. All three books were fairly ephemeral. I can remember some of the major plot points of Amy Cheung’s story, and I have a vivid memory of my mounting frustration at Wei Hui’s preposterous characters and ridiculous situations. I have no recollection whatsoever of the Han Han novel.

The Glorious Day by Han Han

韩寒，《光荣日》

Han Han’s latest novel was billed by promoter Lu Jinbo as “magical realism,” but it’s really just a loosely-connected series of moleitau vignettes. Like his previous novel, The Ideal City (一座城池), this book features a group of friends who have to find a way to support themselves in the remote town in which their journey unexpectedly deposits them. They get housing provided by a school in desperate need of teachers, but spend most of their time trying to make enough money to purchase the necessary supplies for a secret project that Mai Damai, the leader of the group, has cooked up. They have comical run-ins with local law-enforcement, take up with loose women, and exercise a corrupting influence on the young people who have been placed in their care. Han Han’s iconoclastic sensibility is as much in evidence here as in his earlier novels.

However, where City‘s action mostly involved just the three main characters, the shorter Day has to follow the activities of this larger group of classmates, few of whom receive any significant character development. And while City had at least some semblance of plot surrounding its extended joke sequences, this book provides very little to hold together the set pieces, which, in classic Hong Kong comedy tradition, are hit-or-miss. A scene of absurd violence at the start of the book is handled quite well, but there’s an unsettling misogynistic streak to this novel that hasn’t been present in Han’s earlier works. Still, it’s only the first volume, so we can hope that Han Han will tie everything together in the conclusion (if he ever gets around to writing it).

Hongyan Lushui by Amy Siu-han Cheung

张小娴，《红颜露水》

Last summer when I was in Hong Kong getting my visa taken care of, I picked up a copy of this book where it was on display atop the best-seller rack. I’d heard of Amy Cheung before (she was in the news a while back when she announced plans to switch gears and work on a series of vampire-themed horror novels), but I hadn’t ever read any of her work. The mainland edition was published in May.

The title Hongyan Lushui could be translated as something like “Dewy Complexion” if it weren’t taken from the name of the protagonist, Xing Lu (邢露). She’s a barista who left a job at a luxury jewelry store for the freedom that comes with working in a small coffee shop, but still smarts from the indignity of her situation: her family once had money and social standing. We follow Xing Lu’s romantic history through some initial heartbreaks until she hits it off with an impoverished artist, only to inexplicably break off the relationship and torpedo his career.

For about two-thirds of the novel I grew increasingly frustrated with the plot and the idiotic decisions of the main characters, kept interested only by a peculiar little man who turned up from time to time to frighten Xing Lu (I had the notion that the story was moving in a heavily psychological direction, and that this man was a hallucination, or perhaps something supernatural. I was wrong). The story’s conclusion eventually cleared up all of the mysteries and redeemed the characters themselves, whose motives were not as random as they initially appeared. Still, I felt cheated by the way the author had deliberately withheld background information for no reason apart from manufacturing suspense.

In any event, it’s a quick read — between the wait at the airport and the flight back to Beijing I was able to finish it off.

Doggy Dad by Wei Hui

卫慧，《狗爸爸》

A girl rejects her long-term boyfriend’s proposal for reasons she cannot explain and then goes in search of him when he suddenly leaves town. Oh, and she’s accompanied by her late father who has come back to earth as a dog.

Good stories have been written about talking dogs. This is not one of them. Wei Hui is the author of Shanghai Baby, a novel that became a sensation when it was banned for its frank sexual content. Wei’s latest book cuts out the sex, leaving the brand-name dropping and English-language asides feeling a little out of place within a simplistic story of a woman coming to terms with commitment.

The author has described her book un-ironically as “New Age,” and I suppose it’s not unfair to call it a supernatural parable of self-actualization. But it’s not one that we can actually appreciate. Our heroine’s impossibly trusting and generous nature inspires sympathy and understanding in everyone around her. Even con-artists reform themselves when she helps them realize that their profession is unethical. Practically the only purpose of her father the dog (Wei Hui’s publisher flubbed the English title on the cover by not calling the book The Dogfather) is to boost his daughter’s self-esteem by telling her that all of the problems in her life are someone else’s fault.

And that’s basically how the story wraps up. Questions are answered and conflict is resolved when the supporting characters awaken to the error of their ways and make their apologies.

Still, this won’t be the worst book you’ll read all year — you’re going to listen to my advice and not read it at all.

Chinese texts traditionally used no punctuation. A small circle (。) could be used in annotations to mark the end of sentences or phrases, and it also turned up in printed texts, to the lower right of the last character in a sentence.

Before today’s system was standardized, some publishers experimented with alternate ways of punctuating text. We can be glad that the system shown below, on the first page of the 1910 edition of New China (新中国), did not live very long:

In this text, the “。” represents a continuation: the first character of a phrase has no punctuation, but every subsequent character is marked with a “。”. The text is maddening to read, and while some of that difficulty may be due to the mark meaning roughly the opposite of what it means today (a full stop), I suspect that it may not be a very efficient system even for an experienced reader. It’s certainly not meant for hand-written texts.

In a modern edition, the opening paragraph reads:

话说宣统二年正月初一日，在下一觉醒来，见红日满窗，牌声聒耳，晓得时光不早，忙着披衣下床。开门出来，见客堂中双烛辉煌，香烟缭绕。向外挂着神轴，旁配着珊瑚笺对联。桌上十多盆高脚锡盆，满满的装着茶果。几椅台凳，都饰着红披坐垫。蜡台上红烛，已烧去二寸有余。当地铺着红毯，这都是居停主人布置的。

In rough translation:

on the first day of the first month of Xuantong’s second year I awoke a window filled with red sunlight and a grating sound in my ears so I knew it was not early and I hastened to put on my clothes and get out of bed going out I saw a pair of candles burning brightly and incense smoke wafting in the hall a scroll of a deity faced outward flanked by a couplet on coral paper a dozen high-legged nickel basins full of tea snacks several chairs draped with red cushions a red candle in the candlestick burnt down more than two inches a red carpet on the floor all of this arranged by the master of the house

New China was written by Lu Shi’e (陆士谔, 1878-1944), a Chinese herbalist, and tells the story of a man who falls asleep in 1910 and wakes up in 1951 to a fabulous new world in which China is no longer the sick man of Asia. The novella resembles Liang Qichao’s Future of New China (新中国未来记 ,1902) and other late-Qing utopian fantasies, but Lu could actually write fiction: his output ranged from martial arts romances like The Eight Swordsmen (八大剑侠) and The Flying Guillotine (血滴子) to unauthorized sequels like New Outlaws of the Marsh (新水浒) and amounted to some hundred novellas and novels.

New China was recently exploited for use in promoting the Shanghai 2010 World Expo: Lu’s novel was said to have accurately predicted that Shanghai would hold an expo of “10,000 nations” (万国博览会) one hundred years from its date of publication (i.e. in 2010). The novel actually says that Shanghai hosted a domestic expo (内国博览会) in 1928.

In April, Chen Zhanbiao (陈占彪), who has compiled a fascinating volume of eye-witness accounts of World Expos by late-Qing and early Republican Chinese travelers (清末民初万国博览会亲历记, 2010), wrote an excellent rebuttal of the erroneous claims in the China Reading Journal.

As proof, Chen’s article reproduces one of the pages from the 1910 print edition which, like the above image, uses a nearly unreadable system of punctuation.

Murakami Haruki’s popularity in mainland China is due in no small part to Lin Shaohua (林少华), who has produced 33 volumes of translations into Chinese over the course of two decades, beginning with Norwegian Wood in 1989. With What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (当我谈跑步时，我谈些什么), Lin was passed over in favor of Shi Xiaowei (施小炜), a relative unknown who just last week was revealed to be the translator of Murakami’s latest work, 1Q84 (the mainland edition, that is: a Taiwan edition translated by Lai Mingzhu has been out since November).

The Southern Metropolis Daily‘s Sunday book review section (April 25) included a short article based around a conversation held on Sina’s microblog host when an earlier SMD report announcing the translation’s upcoming release was linked by Tan Shanshan.

Some quotes:

Atage: “I read for a decade before I realized I was reading Lin Haruki, not Murakami Haruki, and that’s the shame of it.”

Tan Shanshan: “Actually, it’s Lin Haruki that lots of people like.”

Lao Yao: “The new translator can’t compare to Lin Shaohua. Changing a decade-long reading habit is killing me.”

Huang Yuning of Shanghai Translation Publishing House: “The scariest thing is that lots of people, including those who don’t read Japanese and those who don’t really read Murakami, join in the talk of who is more ‘faithful’ and who has a better feel for the language. The question of ‘faithfulness,’ of familiarization versus alienation, is something that translation theory has a hard time working out, so why are you so easily convinced? Commercialism is understandable, controversy is understandable. Out of commercial aims, like for Running, to attack the original translator all over the press, that’s just….”

Perhaps Lin identified too much with the author. He has been quoted as saying, “When I’m not translating Murakami, after a few days I feel uncomfortable” and “When Murakami says half a sentence, I know what he’ll say in the second half.”

See also: Tim Parks in The Guardian: Why translators deserve some credit. And a review of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters at Quarterly Conversation which quotes this paragraph:

One of the brightest students in a seminar I taught recently asked whether, in The Autumn of the Patriarch, we were reading Rabassa or Garcia Marquez. My first, unthinking response was “Rabassa, of course,” and then a beat later, I added, “and Garcia Marquez.” The ensuing discussion of how difficult it is to separate the two, and what it meant to us as readers, writers, and critics to make the attempt, was one of the liveliest and most engrossing we had that semester.

Image from Golden Book.

I found this graphic posted on a Sina microblog run by Vista magazine (看天下). I wasn’t able to find the original source — Vista is a digest magazine that lifts the majority of its content from other publications, so the image is most likely from somewhere else.

Commenters got a kick out of the edgy, unharmonious illustration of “hedonism.”

I’ve added English labels to the -isms illustrated:

During a trip to the Sanlian bookstore yesterday I discovered a shelf of language pamphlets published by Language and Literature Press (语言出版社). The series sort of resembles those “Very Short Introductions” as limited to the language arts field, and although the writing in the two that I picked up wasn’t particularly engaging, at 3 yuan or so per volume you can’t really go wrong.

The series includes titles by Ji Xianlin and Zhou Youguang; I picked up Numerals in Chinese (汉语的数目字) by Su Jinzhi (苏金智), of whom I know nothing except that one previous publication was a critique of Y.R. Chao’s scholarly work.

Here’s an interesting bit:

数目字在隐语中用其他文字来代替，这是文字的变异。商业活动中人们常常创造另外一套数目字，以达到经商赢利的目的。如明清玉器行流行的数目字隐语是，一为旦，二为竺，三为清，四为罢，五为语，六为交，七为皂，八为未，九为丸，十为章。十个数目字都隐含在隐语的文字中。苏州过去有一种数目字的隐语，也是采用这种字形变异的手法，只不过它直接说出变异的结果。这种隐语把一称为“旦底”，二称为“挖工”，三称为“横川”，四称为“侧目”，五称为“缺丑”，六称为“断大”，七称为“皂底”，八称为“公头”，九称为“未完（丸）”，十称为“田心”。

黑社会活动中，黑社会分子也经常有自己内部使用的一套数目字。

Numerals in coded argot frequently use character substitutions that take the form of written transformations. In commercial transactions, people often use a separate set of numerals in the pursuit of profit. A popular code for numerals in the Ming and Qing era jade sector ran 旦 (dàn), 竺 (zhú), 清 (qīng), 罢 (bà), 语 (yǔ), 交 (jiāo), 皂 (zào), 未 (wèi), 丸 (wán), 章 (zhāng), where each of the ten digits is hidden within a written character of the code. A coded argot once used in Suzhou employed the same technique, except that the result of the written transformation was stated explicitly: one was “the bottom of 旦”, two was “工 dug out,” three was “horizontal 川,” four was “目 on its side,” five was “incomplete 丑,” six was “broken 大,” seven was “the bottom of 皂,” eight was “the top of 公,” nine was “unfinished” [完 and 丸 are homophones, and an unfinished 丸 is 九], and ten was “the heart of 田.”

Gangsters frequently used their own set of numerals in their internal activities.

The book does not provide any examples of underworld usage.

I think I prefer the jade numerals as opposed to the hand-holding Suzhou system. Baidu Baike’s entry on 隐语, provides a slightly different version: 旦底、断工、横川、倒目、扭丑、交头、皂尾、分头、未丸. Ten is left off.

Super-agent Lu Jinbo has the following submission information posted in the sidebar to his blog:

Submission email address:

lujinbo@msn.com

QQ:288588

Notes:

1. Scope is restricted to literature. Target audience is ages 11-30.
2. Submission format: (a) author introduction, 300 characters; (b) synopsis, 500 characters; (c) sample chapters, 3000 characters (must include opening).
3. If you do not receive a reply within a week, your submission has not been accepted. Please forgive us for not replying to every submission. If we are interested in your synopsis and sample, I will contact you by email or phone to request additional chapters or the entire work.

Not replying with a rejection is a little iffy (did he hate it, or did it end up in his spam folder?), but the one-week turnaround is impressive, particularly for someone with Lu’s visibility and reputation for hefty advances.

Is Lu an agent or a publisher? In the US, agents tend to have far quicker response-times than  publishers, but the distinction between the two is not as clear in China. Lu’s got his own cultural company that has book number deals with a state-owned publisher, so it’s not like he’s going to have to shop around titles once he decides to take them on.

Liu Cixin (刘慈欣), a science fiction writer who up until recently has been based in Niangziguan, Shanxi Province, recently posted to the SMTH BBS about signing a contract with the province’s Writers’ Association:

On May 12, I became one of nine writers in the province under contract to the Shanxi Writers’ Association. It’s actually a book agreement: they give part of the money upon signing, and after finishing they give another portion. I signed for Three Body II. I wasn’t cheating them: I started writing after I applied, and by the time it was approved, it had already been published for some time, since after all I couldn’t stay idle for the year in between. They apparently aren’t very clear about the publishing schedule of science fiction novels. The other writers under contract are all worried that they won’t be able to finish on time, and only three of the ten writers in the previous group extended their contracts. They’re going to appoint an older writer to give us special instruction. The previous group had four months’ training at the Lu Xun Institute (impossible for me), and took a trip to Egypt. I hope there’s an opportunity to go abroad, even if just to Ethiopia.

Three Body II: The Black Forest (三体II：黑暗森林), the second volume of an alien invasion trilogy, was published in June, 2008, and made a number of best-of lists for the year.

Further down the thread, in response to an observation that the system seems basically like a book-selling arrangement, he writes:

It’s more like government support. The association sees no profit itself, and I don’t know anyone there. It’s an acknowledgement of science fiction, which is pretty admirable to see in the great realist stronghold of Shanxi Literature.