MCLC: Pathlight and Peregrine

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Han Meng <hanmeng at gmail.com>
Subject: Pathlight and Peregrine
***********************************************************

Source: Prospect Magazine (2/22/12):
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-key-to-china-literary-magazi
nes-new-chinese-fiction-pathlight-chutzpah/

The key to China
by Julia Lovell

To grasp the new spirit of this country, read this fresh, contrarian short
fiction

Say what you like about Mao, he did make it remarkably easy to keep up
with developments in Chinese fiction. Thanks to his proscriptions on
creative freedom, fictional output fell precipitously during his reign. An
average of eight, increasingly socialist realist novels were published
each year between 1949 and 1966. That figure shrank further during the
Cultural Revolution. Staying abreast of translations was simpler still:
until the early 1980s, it was virtually impossible for a mainland Chinese
writer to strike up an independent relationship with a western translator.
Anglophone readers had to rely on translations of establishment authors
published by Beijing’s Foreign Languages Press.

Those dull days are happily long gone. In the early 1980s, a new
generation of novelists born in the 1950s emerged into the post-Mao thaw
and transformed the imaginative landscapes of mainland writing. By around
1985, socialist realism no longer represented the mainstream. Wholesome
epics featuring rosy-cheeked comrades and singing anvils had been
sidelined by macabre, modernist tales of infant sociopaths, juvenile
delinquents and Cultural Revolution cannibalism.

The literary scene became even more diverse in the next decade. As the
catchphrase of the market economy-oriented 1990s became wang qian kan
(“look towards the future,” which, in Chinese, neatly punned on the word
for “future” and “money”), many writers joined in the capitalist
free-for-all. With the literary market threatened by rival distractions
(comics, television, computer games) and the government phasing out
lifetime salaries for state-sponsored writers, serious novelists began
churning out tales of sex and sensation. While conventional print
publishing has expanded over the past two decades (between 2009 and 2010
alone, according to the literary critic and editor Bai Ye, the number of
novels published grew by an estimated 150 per cent), the channels for
reaching readers have also proliferated. The advent of internet
fiction—now an enormously popular genre in China—has brought hope to
millions of aspiring authors, some of whom regularly generate 10,000 words
a day. Both on the internet and in print publishing, fast, cheap, popular
genres dominate. Speed of delivery is a major point of pride for even
China’s most critically acclaimed writers, who admit to shunting unedited
first drafts into print.

It’s now impossible to keep up with contemporary Chinese writing, and
about as difficult to pick out decent work. Overwhelmed Anglophone readers
should therefore welcome the recent launch of two magazines showcasing
contemporary Chinese writing in English translation: Pathlight and
Peregrine, an English-language supplement within Chutzpah, a Chinese
literary journal that models itself on Granta. (The idea in reverse—of
Granta or The Paris Review, for example, running a Chinese-language
supplement—is unthinkable.) The magazines have three points in common but
diverge in most other ways.

To start with, both are based in China. Pathlight is government-funded,
while Chutzpah is bankrolled by Guangzhou’s Modern Media consortium—owned
by Thomas Shao, one of China’s leading private media tycoons. The fact
that two major new magazines are propelling Chinese writing towards an
English-speaking readership reflects the degree to which China has
yearned, for much of the last century, for international attention. Since
the 1980s, the country has suffered from a full-blown Nobel complex: an
anxious desire for one of its citizens to win the Nobel prize for
literature.

Both magazines also share a dissatisfaction with the kind of Chinese
fiction that usually gets translated into English at the moment. Roughly 2
per cent of the books annually published in Britain or the US are
translations, of which work in Chinese forms a tiny proportion of that
tiny proportion. And until now, there has been little overlap between what
works in China and what sells abroad; a Chinese succès d’estime has rarely
recreated that status in an English-language edition. Mainland literati
have long complained that anglophone editors look for sensationalism
rather than literary quality when they buy Chinese titles. What is
arguably being overlooked is a large body of mainland Chinese work that,
while artistically accomplished, fails to win over editorial boards in
London or New York because it lacks a controversial selling point (either
sex or politics; and ideally both). The editors of Pathlight and Chutzpah,
by contrast, aim to steer clear of “banned-in-China” hype. “We only look
at quality, not the whims of the market,” Chutzpah’s editor has
pronounced. “Art is our ruler,” echoes Pathlight.

With both magazines, there seems to be another bias at work. Pathlight and
Chutzpah try to favour younger authors, who have so far been relatively
neglected both in China and in translation. For the past decade, the
dominant form in literary Chinese fiction has been the realist historical
novel set mainly in Maoist China, as penned by male authors born in the
late 1950s or early 1960s (Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan, Su
Tong’s The Boat to Redemption and others). These grand narratives have
been preoccupied with the traumatic landmarks of Maoism: land reform, the
Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and so on. Both Chutzpah and
Pathlight, by contrast, draw attention to novelists born between the late
1960s and 1980s. These generations of writers are broadly unified by a
couple of shared literary characteristics: by a strongly individualistic,
personal voice and by a determination to illuminate (often with wry humour
or playful surrealism) the intense strangeness of the capitalist society
that the Chinese Communist party is now building.

To readers familiar with anglophone literary magazines, Pathlight (right)
begins rather oddly, with a 50-page introduction to China’s pre-eminent
state literary award, the Mao Dun Prize. There are prize speeches full of
strange analogies (one author likens himself to an overstuffed silkworm;
another describes the world as a prehistoric egg yolk). There are stilted
synopses and unedifying excerpts drawn from much longer works (one of
which is 4.5m words in the original) by luminaries of the Writers’ Union.
These 50 pages read more like an anodyne government sales brochure for
Chinese literature than a grandstand for punchy, technically polished
short fiction.

For however much it might protest otherwise, Pathlight is more than a
showcase for unjustly ignored Chinese fiction. Published by the Writers’
Union—an organisation funded by the government’s propaganda department—it
forms part of China’s widely publicised soft-power drive (running to
billions of dollars) of recent years. “With a wide scope and an open
mind,” the magazine’s editors have declared, “we choose articles that
truly exemplify and represent the abundant and complicated realities of
our country, past and present.” But almost in the next breath they
observe, with disarming frankness, that “literature, if promoted
effectively, will also… boost the country’s soft power.”

Freedom of expression in China has undoubtedly broadened in recent years.
A former minister of culture, for example, argued in 2007 that writers
were perfectly free to describe social problems, as long as they did not
stray into political analysis. But it is an inconvenient truth that
interesting literature is rarely cleanly apolitical; and this arbitrary
divide between the social and the political often results in a marked
tameness or superficiality in writers and works sponsored by China’s
literary establishment.

Pathlight improves when it ceases to read like the print equivalent of a
stuffy official banquet and moves on to half a dozen short stories by
younger authors. Among these, the shorter ones are the best. The two
strongest are “A Rare Steed for the Martial Emperor” and “Raising Whales,”
by Xiang Zuotie (born 1974), each only two A4 pages long and both
translated with assurance by Brendan O’Kane. The first is a hallucination
by a foot soldier of the Han dynasty (circa 200 BC) that coheres through
its use of colour and its evocation of the hothouse world of imperial
whim. The second is an absurdist take on China’s get-rich-quick fever, as
a landlocked village slowly runs out of containers to house its growing
whale farm. Indeed, much of the best Chinese writing done in the last 30
years has eschewed the realism that dominated 20th-century Chinese fiction
and set off on flights of fancy. “Williams’ Tomb” by Di An (born 1983) is
a competent dissection of a dysfunctional family (sociopathic alpha-male
father, abused mother, homosexual son) that trips up on some puzzling
descriptions. Chinese girls, we learn at one point, “are like cigarette
butts that are still alight, easily distinguished by their easy heft and
warm ash.”

In tone and content, Chutzpah’s translation supplement is a very different
creature. Now on its fifth issue, the magazine is more conventionally
commercial in look, carrying chic adverts for Glenlivet, Mini and Mont
Blanc. Chutzpah’s editor-in-chief is Ou Ning, a cultural entrepreneur in
his early forties with expertise in a remarkable range of forms: design,
architecture, film, video art, poetry, fiction and essay-writing. This is
a publishing set-up that—although still subject to state censorship—has
cut loose from official funding, and as a result seems a more comfortable
home for the type of fresh, contrarian writing favoured by younger writers
who have largely made their way outside the communist establishment. With
the collapse of the iron rice bowl, novelists who began publishing after
1989 have become “free writers” (ziyou zuojia), existing beyond the
old-style socialist literary system and forced to live by the market
economy.

In Chutzpah, as in Pathlight, some of the best fiction has a surreal
whimsy to it. One of my favourites is “A Gift From Bill Gates” by Wu Ang
(born 1974), whose hapless, unemployed narrator reinvents himself as a
writer and takes control of his destiny in Walter Mitty-style fantasies.
After writing his aggravating wife, son and mother out of his life, he
recruits an ancient Chinese philosopher, Mozi, to assist him in first
scamming $500m from Bill Gates, then flushing the computer mogul down the
toilet.

Some of the work has political bite, as well as technical flair. “The
Curse” by A Yi (born 1976) is set in a south China village whose young
have migrated to the big cities as temporary labourers. A lonely widow
embroiled in quarrels with her neighbours waits for her son to come back
from Guangzhou for New Year. Returning late on New Year’s Eve, the son
immediately retreats to bed. Within an hour, he is dead—his body destroyed
by the chemical factory that has employed him. The potential melodrama of
the story’s premise and denouement is averted by A Yi’s narrative
discipline and controlled evocation of the ignorance and despair that trap
China’s rural poor.

Another of Chutzpah’s strengths is its willingness to elasticate its
definition of Chinese fiction to include Taiwanese novelists or ethnically
Chinese writers working in other languages. Having discovered modernist
literary techniques in the 1960s—a full 20 years before the People’s
Republic—Taiwanese writers have had a substantial headstart on their
mainland peers in terms of linguistic and narrative sophistication. And
Chinese literature has become noticeably more interesting—in both content
and style—since the 1990s with the emergence of several talented exile and
émigré writers: Yan Geling, Ma Jian, Ha Jin, Yiyun Li. (Regrettably, many
contemporary mainland writers only grudgingly acknowledge sinophone
authors working in the west, challenging their ability to depict the
Chinese condition outside the mainland and accusing them of feeding
western fantasies about an exotically backward, oppressive China.)
Chutzpah’s selection of diaspora stories has so far omitted some of the
best work available: rather than choosing one of Ha Jin’s dark, disturbing
army stories, its editors have published instead a sympathetic but
slightly anti-climactic tale of a Chinese immigrant nurse struggling with
the lecherous demands of a senile old man and his manipulative daughter.
Also sadly missed is Yiyun Li, for her precise emotional plotting and
restrained allusions to the traumas of modern China (although her work is
featured in the Chinese-language section of the magazine). But Li-Young
Lee’s “The Winged Seed” is an effective, if at times overwritten, piece: a
fluid combination of flashback and hallucination that moves between
contemporary Chicago and a privileged childhood in pre-communist China—a
world on the brink of violent destruction.

If we are to judge both these magazines by their mission statements (to
publish Chinese-language fiction of the highest “artistic quality”),
Chutzpah is currently the better read. For now, Pathlight still wears its
links with China’s literary establishment too heavily. Give it time and
more editorial freedom, though, and it might well grow into an important
conduit for bringing new Chinese voices into English. For although British
presses seem fixated on publishing novels, the talents of Chinese writers
are far better showcased by their short fiction. China today is not the
kind of place that encourages the professional dedication to literary
craft essential to successful long fiction. Writers rarely revise; editors
barely edit; they are too busy blogging, filmmaking, or chasing after the
next big literary trend. The short story is the ideal literary form for a
country suffering so acutely from attention deficit disorder: long enough
to capture a meaningful fragment of this confounding country; (usually)
brief enough to prevent authors reaching for melodramatic plot hinges or
slack description. To understand how China’s literary minds are making
sense of their country, then, read their short stories, not their novels.
Chutzpah and Pathlight’s selections are a good place to start.

links: for Pathlight (http://paper-republic.org/pathlight/); for
Chutzpah/Peregrine 
(http://paper-republic.org/ericabrahamsen/peregrine-downloads/).