Ge Fei and his South of Yangtse Trilogy (2025)

Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World (review)

China Review International, 2007

With ten full-length novels, many volumes of short stories and essays, and a considerable amount of poetry to his name, not to mention the significant body of scholarship dedicated to the study of his oeuvre, Jia Pingwa Èsù (b. 1952) has emerged as one of the most important literary figures in China during the post-Mao era. Jia's dogged devotion to his home province of Shaanxi, and all the linguistic and cultural minutiae that that entails, have helped situate Jia as an author of rare, if not entirely unique, talent. His work has attracted the critical attention of a wide variety of Chinese and Japanese intellectuals, though the research in English, with fewer than a dozen published articles and book chapters by my account, has lagged until now. And only one of his novels to date has been translated into English. Thus, Yiyan Wang's single-author study is more than a welcome addition; it has now set the standard for all Jia Pingwa studies in Western languages. While comprehensive treatments of his work exist in Chinese, Narrating China is the first such work in a Western language, and a superb one at that. Indeed, in general, single-author treatments of modern Chinese literary figures are discouraged by publishers on the justification that they will not sell as well as thematic works, works of literary history, or works on groups of writers or literary movements. This is disheartening because modern Chinese literary studies are finally reaching a period of maturation, both in terms of subject matter and the academic field, that behooves us to produce more specialized, detailed, and focused secondary works in the way that scholars of English and European literatures, and even of Japanese literature, are able to do ± and, most important, to get them published. Narrating China is a book in ten chapters with a conclusion and several appendices as well as a comprehensive bibliography. It is meticulously researched and gives the reader the impression that the author has read all of Jia's work available at the time of writing in addition to all the Jia scholarship in Chinese (not Japanese). The first two chapters lay the groundwork for the several chapters to follow, which are devoted to one extent or another to each of Jia's novels and, to a lesser extent, to his poetry and prose. Wang spends a particularly large portion of her book on the analysis of Jia's Feidu, which she translates somewhat idiosyncratically as Defunct Capital. I can only presume that we are to gather from this that she views it as his most important work. It certainly is the one that has generated the most controversy and discussion, not all of it (to say the least) positive. The book begins with an introduction which, after a brief exposition of the tendency of Jia to include autobiographical elements in his texts and his self-avowed role as a``peasant writer,'' turns to a detailed and thoughtful examination of Jia's status as a``nativist'' É author. Wang then unveils an extensive account of the history of nativist literature in modern Chinese literary history. This sketch includes sections on Lu Xun, Lao She, Shen Congwen, CCP dogma, and at least briefly mentions the contributions of several other writers. It also takes into consideration scholarship written on the topic, both in English and Chinese. There is scant reference to Taiwan's well-known and well-documented nativist literary debates and reputed exponents of Taiwanese nativism, such as Huang Chunming, Chen Yingzhen or Wang Zhenhe, all of whom wrote in Chinese, a point I will return to at the end of this review. Wang concludes this line of argument by situating Jia Pingwa book reviews 293

• ‘Book Review for David Der-wei Wang (ed.), A New Literary History of Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)', China Review International, Vol. 24, no. 1 (2019): 60-67.

One thing that struck this reviewer was the absence of the war in the daily lives of people living in rural Sichuan. The book takes place during the Second-Sino Japanese War (1937)(1938)(1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943)(1944)(1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1945)(1946)(1947)(1948)(1949) that came after it. Shen Baoyuan was in Sichuan because Yenching University in Beijing was forced to close and move as the Japanese occupied large swaths of northern and eastern China. Yet, the war is conspicuously absent from the daily level of her subjects of inquiry. This is perhaps a testament to the variations of wartime experiences had by people living in the countryside in the interior as opposed to people living in coastal and northern regions which were under Japanese occupation.

Daughter of Good Fortune: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Memoir by Huiqin Chen with Shehong Chen

Twentieth-Century China, 2017

To the Frontier of the Mind: Shen Congwen and World Literature

A Companion to World Literature

One of the most original modern Chinese writers, Shen Congwen is best known for his “native‐soil” stories set in his hometown region of West Hunan. There is, however, an international dimension to Shen's literary regionalism in terms of influence and inspiration. More important, if Shen Congwen deserves a fellowship with other prominent writers of local‐color fiction in the realm of world literature, it would be owing less to the regional and social issues he writes about than to the innovative ways he modernizes traditional Chinese aesthetics to push his literary exploration of these issues from the geographical frontier to the frontier of the human psyche. The fact that Shen gives psychologically complex leading roles to rural characters and those from the lower classes of society makes his writing all the more subversive.

Yang Fudong’s Unhomely Dwelling through an Estranged Paradise

Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013, 2013

Chinese Literature (Singapore: Asiapac, 2012); co-translated with Li En

In this volume, "Chinese Literature," you will meet great minds among the Chinese literates. Since reading is a form of pleasure that has been enjoyed for thousands of years, literature gives us the opportunity to meet great writers in Chinese history who have distilled their thoughts on life and society. This book will track the development of literature from the pre-Qin Dynasty era to the last monarchal regime, the Qing Dynasty.

Review of Barme and Goldkorn, eds., Civilising China: China Story Yearbook 2013 (The China Journal 2015)

Book Review: Yiran Zheng, Writing Beijing: Urban Spaces and Cultural Imaginations in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Films

MCLC, 2018

It was a map of Beijing that sparked Yiran Zheng’s interest in the subject for her book Writing Beijing: Urban Spaces and Cultural Imaginations in Contemporary Literature and Film. Looking at the city’s distinctive spatial structure of “square-like loops” (x), formed by its major ring roads, she noticed how one can read the history of the city in its architectural shape; from its centermost area, still largely consisting of narrow alleyways (􁙲􀝶) lined with traditional Beijing-style courtyard houses (􀢥􀝳􁴺), through the three- to fourstory Soviet-style apartment blocks built from the 1950s to the 1970s (between the 2 and 3 ring roads), to the modern high rises that have sprung up since the 1980s (between the 3 and 4 ring roads), and the recently built townhouses and single-family houses (outside the 4 ring road). In Writing Beijing, Zheng takes three of the city’s representative urban spaces—courtyard houses, military compounds, and (post)modern architecture—as the basis of the book’s three-part structure.

Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family

Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies, 2018

A Tale of Two Chinas

Development and Change, 2015

As I launched into this review, the implications of reviewing two books so unalike became increasingly clear to me. Linda Yueh's China's Growth is built upon the idea of explaining the Chinese economic miracle and the prospects for further growth for another thirty years; Emily Yeh's Taming Tibet explores the depredations wrought upon the soil, water, culture and people of Tibet by this same mode of expansion. Yueh's is an aggregative, national study of China and its international economic relations, whereas Yeh focuses on an ethnographic geography of Lhasa and peri-urban Tibet. The former is premised upon cautious optimism, the latter upon an exposition of structural injustice. Nor can Linda Yueh's proposals for reform in China solve the forms of structural injustice analysed by Yeh. Turning, as Mao Zedong advised, a bad thing into a good thing, I try to understand the very problem of this kind of incommensurability. Is it possible for sensible people not especially pre-committed to the truth of one or the other side of the story to come out with a coherent view of China? Is China-as is any other nation-a coherent entity? Is it about different groups and aspects of society that will benefit or suffer? Or will one side of the story prevail? Both books represent a great deal of scholarly research and analytical work. It behoves us to follow their arguments closely. Turning to Yueh, the author has amassed a vast quantum of research from a variety of sources and combines this material with an equal variety of methodological approaches ranging from mainstream neoclassical principles, micro-economics, new institutionalism (especially as it concerns the legal order), social network