Languages

Yu Jian composes an elegy to a majestic elephant as it marches across Asia. Rising above the land, it precedes the grayness of Asia.   A robed king, boundless and lost, stands at the edge of Xishuangbanna and Laos.  It’s the jungle’s shield. The Creator bestows its symbolism, endowing it with a face of grief, hiding diamonds behind its blue eyelids; imitating crescent moons to shape its tusks, keeping palm-leaf manuscripts secret in its wrinkles. Huge...

Words without Borders · Poems in Translation Contest: "Trial Run, " by Yau Ching, tr. Chenxin Jiang Listen above to Chenxin Jiang read her translation of Yau Ching's "Trial Run"                        as a door-nail            and gone          to the world            air           broke drop nothing is...

In two poems, Yu Jian considers the emotional and physical roles of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Dearest Great facial mask    now is the time to tell you that I love you my dearest my little prison take custody of my mouth   The Man without a Mask I don’t have a mask when I phone someone for help I behave as if I don’t care dignified expressions      like those in first-class cabins on a sinking ship  ...

Guo Jing, the first woman in China to win a gender discrimination case against a state-owned enterprise, chronicles daily life under the COVID-19 lockdown in Wuhan, China, in this excerpt from her Diary of the Wuhan Lockdown. April 3, 2020 Yesterday, the Wuhan COVID-19 Epidemic Prevention and Control Headquarters issued a notice advising that the city lockdown needs to be continued. Many citizens left messages on the Chinanews social media account requesting government...

A Chinese fishing expedition devolves into a mutinous bloodbath in “Massacre in the Pacific,” reporter Du Qiang’s interview with one of the few crew members who made it home alive. The Lurongyu 2682, which belonged to the Rongcheng Aquatic Product Company of Shandong Province, was a squid-jigging vessel measuring thirty to forty meters long and with a 330 kW power engine. In December 2010, it set off to fish for squid off the coast of Chile and Peru, with a crew of...

  "Cloth Birds" is one of four winning poems selected by Mónica de la Torre for the Words Without Borders—Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest.   Listen to Natascha Bruce read her translation of Hong Kong poet Dorothy Tse's "Cloth Birds."     Listen to Dorothy Tse read "Cloth Birds” in the original Cantonese.   There's no cloth hawker in the bazaar  willing to make dirty deals  with the...

Divine and mortal love intertwine in this poem by Li Hao, one of a handful of contemporary Chinese poets writing forcefully and overtly about Christian themes.   I invited you too soon to my city, because I wanted to live with you, because I wanted to find in your songs  the Almighty’s power and love. Because I wanted to know how you loved Him, and your sweet former lives. I know your bodies are the language the Lord bestowed upon me. I see your unfamiliar...

In this poem about the Shuktilingka, Tibetan poet and activist Tsering Woeser writes about a world that has nearly been lost.   Watch a video of Tsering Woeser reciting her poem "Absent, or Not Absent" in the original Mandarin.     Dedicated to Gyalwa Rinpoche on his eighty-second birthday     1. The Empty Dharma Throne: Shukti The Shuktilingka once stretched out before the Potala Palace, lush and verdant.  Shukti means...

A poem about suffering and the Divine by the Chinese poet Li Hao, whose first collection, The Tempest, was banned in China.    The clamor of the dead on the wall spin in the lobes of my lungs the vault of heaven’s many gears: corpulent Leviathan of my soul, covered in knifepoints, making the heavens rain down iron nails. Eternal light strikes upon the earth’s altars. Lord, I am foolish, I am suffering, and my body, like a spoon, here on this earth,...

In these three poems from the collection Perhaps: Love Poems, Tibet-born poet Xi Wa explores her personal Tibetan Buddhist path.   1. Vimalaki Sutra Simultaneously we sink into May The scent of the locust tree bloom, the fragrance of enlightenment, falling upon a single tendril from the vine of language My seeming frivolity, my carelessness, cannot completely eclipse  our first encounter, when my heart was brushed atremble. Tangled. Insatiate . . ....

A village tailor, a lonely client, and the shy apprentice caught in the middle, from a novel by Lu Min​.   Listen to Lu Min read "Scissors, Shining" in the original Chinese.   I was extremely devoted to studying Master Song’s craft, surrounded by swaths of cloth and bits of thread, whiling away a boyhood like a plant dyed an unnatural hue, brightly colored, but sick inside, silently suffering. I would go home once a week, and my parents would poke fun at...

A couple bets on success in the casino industry in Koh Choon Eiow and Mok Sio Chong’s play.     Read by Ma Wal-in and Koh Choon Eiow in Mandarin and Cantonese. CHORUS     His name is Ken. He’s from Muar, Johor State, Malaysia, Southeast Asia. He came to work in Macau a year ago.                      He came to Macau a year ago, to work as a casino fixer.        ...

An ambitious young woman learns the hideous secret behind the success of her cutthroat Macanese company in Eric Chau’s tale, illustrated by Chi-Wai Un.   There was once a little fishing port, nestled between two little hills. On the eastern hill was a lighthouse, its beam piercing the stillness of the night, lighting up the west. One day, the fishing port started to change. All kinds of skyscrapers began to spring up, blocking the hills. The lighthouse disappeared from view....

Poet Agnes Lam turns a cold eye on contemporary Macau.   1. Two Worlds this city I come from when I come here its deep recesses wield twilight like a knife slicing the world in two the world begins with a slot machine but its end is nowhere to be found within the world someone detonates the night knocks at the gates of ruin a flash of fortune and the night is purgatory hot in the city's heart people and fire are as one “Save me! Oh, save me!” the flash bulbs no longer...

Leading Macanese poet Un Sio San considers an abandoned hotel and the demolition of a city’s history​.   His body Was born in a barn His virginity Vanished with the summer Becoming an octopus, a peacock While his heart turned holy Setting down its complex baggage To embark on The slow Sermon of the world A cocktail of enlightened spirits and sweat The choppy world has no buoys No lifeguards, no lanes His nakedness is naked His laziness is lazy Soaking in youth,...

In the wake of loss, a woman fills her life with a mouthy and ever-growing new feline companion.  The cat had died at dusk. The breath of that life had slipped away along with the last streaks of sunlight. “As the body grew cold and stiff, it turned into a swamp you could easily sink into.” This was the explanation I’d always planned to give him for why the cat had left so many empty spaces in my rooms. I couldn’t wait to tell him; it was like being chased by...

Speech and writing aside, there must exist other routes to the heart of language. Perhaps the “chewing words” method buried along with City 1997 was merely one of those.     The International Fictional Cities website (www.internationalfictionalcities.com) makes it easy to find cities as tiny as those numbered 1982 to 1996, or 1998 to 2007. Users can locate them on interactive maps, view 3-D photos of any street they like, and learn about the latest...

In this bizarre tale by the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi, a once banal, everyday fruit intoxicates the popular imagination of Fertile Soil Town.    1 “How come so many people are applying for travel documents?” an official from the Immigration Department asked. “Thousands and thousands of ’em are turning up out of the blue—it’s really strange.” The official who processed paperwork inked stamp after stamp.  “If this were a...

A near-death experience prompts an argument between a couple on the nature of hell in this piece from Chinese author Zhang Xinxin.   It wasn’t the first time that Steve and I had talked about the next life. But this time I actually bared my soul. The red and blue lights of the police car were flashing. The ambulance siren wailed. I was strapped to the stretcher, my body all mashed up. But my mind was intact, and I was fully conscious—to the extent that I was...

Yeng Pway Ngon’s aging opera lover struggles to recapture lyrics and memories of a thwarted star tenor. Helpless before the heavens we part, what sorrow, what rage; the farewell heart clings to the drooping willow, goodbye tears splash the flowers—The old man struggles to remember the lyrics to Revisiting the Long Pavilion Willows, humming bits and pieces. It’s been too long since he’s sung anything, too long since he heard this tune. When he was young, he adored...

Kuo Pao Kun exposes the personal wreckage left in the wake of the state’s aggressive pursuit of international financial status in the 1960s. This was the first full-length play by Singapore’s theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun and was a sensation when it was first staged in 1968, drawing rave reviews. Starting from the 1960s, the Singapore government embarked on an economic strategy of attracting foreign investors and multinationals, and building up tourism as an economic pillar, often...

Wong Koi Tet’s childless man, desperate for an heir, resorts to superstition to jack up his potency. Ong Par had been waiting for over three hours, frozen in a squat among the chaotic shadows cast by the crisscrossing branches of the trees towering over him. One thought occupied his mind all this time: that he might not have a son to perform his last rites. He was light-headed from the smell of his own sweat mingled with the hum of the swamp insects and the humid tropical heat...

And so the answer is revealed, to the riddle asked only once in a lifetime (one of the biggest questions in life, perhaps the biggest): your husband Chang Te-Mo will appear again after his death. What kind of ghost will he be? (And here it comes, here it comes, the question in return: “What kind of person was he?”) After the body is cleaned, it’s time to escort him to the morgue. You tell him, “Chang Te-Mo, it’s all right now.” For the last time, you...

She was used to relying on other people. I had a habit of protecting girls. If she was in class at a set time, for a set time, I was there to soak it up. In class I was a show-off, but from the moment classes ended till the moment they started up again, I was gone. Her long hair trailed over her shoulders. Her elegant clothing gave her the appearance of being around twenty-four or twenty-five. That entire year I went for a kind of misfit look, wearing outdated jeans that made me look barely...

(Night. Nadie, an Indonesian domestic worker, lies beneath a mosquito net with Granny, the woman she was employed to look after.) GRANNY:  Mosquitoes. NADIE:       I put up the net. There can’t be mosquitoes. GRANNY:   Mosquitoes! NADIE:       Argh! You’re doing this on purpose! GRANNY:   Ha ha! It’s my pak . . . pak . . . (She slaps a mosquito with each “pak.”)...

11-14 A tangerine sun gave my birdcage a ripe rinsing Its spacious temporary closure is uncommonly loud and clear Dead ringer for a dime   12-25 Fingertips are spark-tinted. Their milk contains one-percent fat Slow results. Delay dowager’s hump. Low-lying pain. A leaky fist. I am willing to carve you a ten-second slice of winter. 嘹亮的雨水有原諒的美 © Ye Mimi. By arrangement with the author....

Everything but everything was just so sweet To cater to his every wish To allow him to do exactly as he pleased with me To sacrifice the self I’d lost completely Entirely to him It was all so trivial it’s hardly worth mentioning But it shimmered with light I’m a pig, he said, isn’t that right? I’m the pig, I said, you’re just an idiot We were like vodka with a vodka chaser and a litter of kids who were just like honey Our kids will never forget vodka...

“Ah Ju’s back!” Ah Ju, the girl from the road crew dormitory. That’s what we all called her, because that’s where she grew up. She disappeared for a quite a while, but now she was back, and she brought two people with her: her fiancé, and her unborn child. I hadn’t seen her pregnant belly yet, so I didn’t know if it was a bump or a peak, if she was going to have a boy or a girl. But if there’s one thing I did know, it’s that women...

1. It was a winter’s night, the kind with icy winds that blew so hard they tore into one’s pores and a cold that was enough to make each lonely heart freeze over. There, in the park, a ghostly young man drifted, a wandering soul with no family or friends to rely on. His black eyes flashed beneath the murky gray lamppost light as he watched me walking toward him. “This late and you’re not going home yet?” I patted one of his hunched up shoulders and he made an...

The hand of the pocket watch winds on with a sound like mocking laughter—continuously pricking his anxiety, preventing him from forgetting how the nightmare started. He remembers. This is how it began: That day of the winter holiday happened to be Aso’s birthday. The bus passed through the deep gloom of the bamboo forest, delivering him, in a daze, to the spa town. The lattice of bamboo shadows fell upon him like a glitter of whirling blades, dicing his body to bits. He did, in...

Father’s bookshelves were lined mostly with Marxist-Leninist books. I remember the titles on some of the spines. I can’t remember some others, because the words were too abstract. I loitered in front of Father’s bookcase every day. One day, out of the blue, Father brought home from the library several books of foreign fairy tales (by then, he had been sent to work under surveillance in the library—this was called “reeducation through labor”). Father...

Letter Ten May 11 Dearest Yong, My sister sent me the two CDs that I wanted. She sent them on May 7. The courier rang the doorbell and handed them to me this morning, and I immediately rushed over to my desk to record the flood of Tokyo memories. The two CDs were of music we listened to together in Tokyo. I secretly hid our love we experienced in three of the tracks. I’m still waiting for the pictures we took, the ones I took of you and the ones you took of me, and most of all,...

In the morning, a word from someone else's dream peeks at me like a conspiracy. The minute I open my eyes the word, with an elegant gesture, takes me. The lonely word is a terminal patient: pain and screaming, possibly lethal. But I’m envious—it flies up the minute it takes me. 6.28.1995

Once upon a time we used to talk about a bird— a bird from nowhere brought us levity   and laughter. One winter night—yes it was a winter night—a bird came to us while we were soundly sleeping. Neither of us saw it. In the morning we saw—sun on glass— its small shadow printed, staying for a long time, refusing to leave. Then, we started to hate winter, the long slumber. We put a red lamp outside so its light would tell our bird we were waiting. Then...

I'm holding a big round golden grapefruit that smells bitter. A small knife can cut through what seems to be a thick skin— I begin to shiver in quiet pain. A life without pain is an unpicked fruit: it rots. I want to be a grapefruit cut by a knife or bitten by teeth. I’d rather have pain and die in pain peacefully than watch my body rot with maggots squirming inside. This whole winter I’ve been doing one thing repeatedly— peeling grapefruits one after...

A heat wave rolled into the city, and reports of elderly heatstroke victims streamed in continually. Sirens wailed, and pet dogs lay panting in the shade. It was much better in the suburbs, where tall poplars and willows provided shade. All day long, cicadas sang in the trees. After it rained, toads chimed in with their bass voices. The numerous sparrows and magpies leaped lightheartedly among the branches and in the thickets. All of them affectionately shared their food, with only...

After Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, publishers around the world rushed to print copies of his books—none more enthusiastically than China’s infamous book pirates. In China, where piracy is so blatant that street booksellers hawk illegal copies of Mo’s work in front of his house, counterfeiting is rampant and prosecution infrequent. In the case of Mo, the authorities have made some effort to crack down; on April 9, 2013, the Haidian People’s Court...

“I’m free!” Scarlet shouted, waving a letter at me. She was down in the street, holding onto her rolled-up pant legs, knee-deep in floodwater. From where I stood on the balcony, I could see her craning her slender neck upward, looking rather like a small flamingo about to take flight. “My mom’s dead! I don’t have to do it anymore! I’m free!” It was early summer, 1989. It had been raining for seven days straight and builders’ rubble had...

carefully giving it some thought the lines on my palm[1] have deflected for you some now I suppose my dirty beard, my fiendish leg hair will graduate in time that someone of my years should care about minutiae but it’s true I never held you in my arms those training grounds where one prepares for hardship even the most majestic backdrop wouldn’t be a match for this bucktoothed “Cheese” into the camera ke-cha! then good-bye good-bye no one can...

1. Heavenly Body Rocky Wang was sitting in Tianxiang Park. The flagstones were cool, and pale in the moonlight. The couple starting kissing. (This was before it happened.) Rocky put his hand in the front of his jacket, his mind empty. He wasn’t waiting for anyone in particular—though he felt something was going to happen. The dog that hung around every night turned up and barked at him. Rocky got angry and bared his teeth, and it went off into another frenzy of barking. Then...

This essay is part of “What Kind of China do We Want?,” a project of the Foreign Policy Initiative to inform the American public about the ideas and goals of China’s intellectuals, activists and dissidents.  It was noon on a summer’s day in 1966.  The weather was hot, so my grandmother took us to have lunch under the shade of a tree.  Just as the food was being put on the table, a foul burning smell came from over the horizon, making it difficult to...

Exiled writer Liao Yiwu was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on October 14, 2012. In its citation, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association praised Liao Yiwu as "a Chinese author who continues to wage an eloquent and fearless battle against political repression and who lends a clear and unmistakable voice to the downtrodden and disenfranchised of his country. In his prose and poetry, Liao Yiwu erects an evocative literary monument to those people living on the...

Writer Yang Xianhui traveled around China interviewing survivors of the great famine of 1959.  He circumvented government censorship by adding details and presenting the results as fiction. In this chapter from his book The Dingxi Orphanage, a woman describes the horrific toll the famine took on her village. I grew up in the legendary Black Rock Village, a part of Xiangnan Township in Tongwei County. Old village folks used to recount a well-known tale: One night, with a loud...

At Thinkers Café, a dimly lit café near Peking University, Yan Lianke chooses a side table with a desk lamp that flickers on and off as we speak. The outspoken author and ex-military man is strikingly mild-mannered. Yan enlisted in the army when he was a teenager. He spent the next two decades as a military propaganda writer, while testing the state censors’ limits and his army superiors’ patience with an increasingly ambitious and politically pointed series of...

He lay back on the sofa, tipsy. She had invited him out for a meal and now they were back at her flat. He was a renowned poetry critic with a successful career. She was just an aspiring poet. He had agreed to help her be “successful”—that was the word they used in China nowadays. It was not easy to be a successful poet. She would have to work hard. She offered him tea to sober him up. Then they could go on talking about poetry—Rilke and Yeats, even Foucault and...

Memories of the Cowshed is one of China’s top bestsellers on the Cultural Revolution. Ji Xianlin’s 1998 memoir recounts the painful and deeply disenchanting period he spent in the “cowshed,” an improvised prison on the Peking University campus for intellectuals labeled as “class enemies.” After the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the cowsheds became a taboo subject on campuses across China, where persecutors and victims often continued to work...

Zhang Yihe is a prominent Peking Opera scholar who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for writing about Jiang Qing, or Madame Mao, in her diary. She has written numerous works of nonfiction and two works of fiction (so far). Zhang Yihe’s father, Zhang Bojun, one of the founders of the China Democratic National Construction Association, was named “Number One Rightist” by Mao Tse-Tung. Zhang’s memoir, The Past Is Not Like Smoke, was published in 2004 and...

Chan Koon-chung’s gray, shoulder-length hair is a throwback to the seventies, when Chan founded an influential cultural and alternative lifestyle magazine, City Magazine. Chan has since made a point of being where the action is: City Magazine saw Hong Kong navigate the anxiety-filled return to Chinese sovereignty, and in the early nineties, Chan moved to Taiwan, where he worked in television during the transition to full democracy that had the country choose its first popularly...

Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue, which takes its title from the famous poem by Paul Celan, is an absurdist allegorical tale about freedom and shackles, rebellion and dictatorship. The protagonist, Yuan Mengliu, is a poet who gives up poetry to become a doctor and moves to a city he thinks is Utopia, only to realize that it is controlled by a dictatorship. In this scene, Yuan Mengliu goes on a walk with a woman from the city. Yuan Mengliu did not worry about the precise location of the...

The frog was leaping away but we were closing in on both sides, running along bent over, our eyes fixed on its yellow-green back, the mud  squishing under our feet. There had just been a cloudburst and the leaden sky indicated it was going to rain again. But this frog was a whopper, much bigger than any we had in our bag, and Xiaomao wasn’t going to let it get away. Before it got to the dike, the frog leaped into the air and landed on a tuft of grass. It was just about to take...

-1- Just as it was about time for the Festival of the Ghosts, Mother drew my two sisters and me to her. A worried look on her face, she said, “I’m afraid I won’t live much longer.” She pulled up her pant-legs, revealing bruises the size of copper coins. “Last night, I dreamed I was fighting over hell money with dead people . . . See, Luo Xiao hit me here with his ritual implement, and Xiaoqing made this other bruise.” Luo Xiao was a shaman in...

Zheng Xiaolu, editor of a literary magazine, is only twenty-five years old. He was probably twenty-two when he wrote this story. Last year, he and another editor visited me to discuss how I arrange for publication of my works.  Later on, he sent his stories to me.  After reading his short stories, I was astonished, because he is still so young and yet he writes like an old hand.  Moreover, gloomy and forceful power shows through between the lines. He has a sober and profound...

a dog lives it’s your shadow it learns about life learns to go to toilets learns to run forward with a lighter in its mouth once you take out a cigarette not only does it run forward with a lighter in its mouth it tugs your sock too and runs about like you’ve been everywhere it barks at the mirror full of fear when you fart it straightens its ears you go to the washroom, it rummages behind the toilet bowl you write, it’ll knock out some nonsense on the...

We had a visitation from a woman who’d been dead for many years we felt her presence but see her we could not heard her voice instructing us to turn the hand-crank of the projector in the room (there’s always a room with one) and as the sprockets clicked the flywheels spun a cone of light (it’s always a cone of light) illumined a corner of the room where she appeared   like every spirit ought to we were so bewitched we quite forgot to ask her what the afterlife was...

The smallest citizen of Königsberg spent a lifetime parasitically attached to his timepiece whose faultless clockwork      began to turn at precisely 5 a.m. when not another soul had stirred      and even god was still dreaming scion of a master saddler      in his red-cloth nightcap customary black frock      Kant built a saddle      to master the world seven...

On a certain day in a certain month of the Enlightenment clear skies      light winds out of the southwest high in the low 70s Beethoven is born in a bed on a certain day in a certain month of the Enlightenment a soap dish tumbles to the floor the other foot steps into a slipper Mozart says keep your eye on this Beethoven he’s going to rock the world on a certain day in a certain month of the Enlightenment “Hello! Good evening!” “Hello...

I met Ni Dongxue in 2006, in a quiet and nicely decorated gay bar through two musician friends who played in a band there. The bar is located in the city’s Moziqiao region, a popular nightlife spot. A pioneer and recognized leader in Chengdu’s gay community, the then-thirty-six-year-old Ni graduated from Beijing Teachers’ University with a master’s degree in psychology. Ni wore heavy makeup and a bright yellow shirt. He said he visited the place every week to...

She is old breasts sagging like bags of flour River runs from their hometown people on two banks change batch after batch like summer fireflies that glow and dim But the river won’t change in its capacity to reflect the moon If impermanence still saddens me I must be a fool Translation of   "Fu fu lao gu jing. " Copyright Yang Jian. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2011 by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. All rights reserved.

Grandmother’s last clothing is a reed mat her coffin a small fishing boat The year was 1960 She stole a kilo of yellow beans Those who ordered her to kneel on snail shells are mostly dead Those still alive are also old Some are tending shops some sleep or herd ducks Translation of   "Yi jiu liu ling nian ji shi. "  Copyright Yang Jian. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2011 by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. All rights reserved.

One Sunday morning a year ago, Erwin Chan opened his apartment door with the intention of buying a newspaper and saw a little cat approaching him, meowing and looking warily about. It had a delicate, pretty face and was golden brown from head to tail. Erwin offered it some milk, but it refused to drink and ran beneath the bookcase. When he failed to coax it out, Erwin peeked under the bookcase and saw the little cat was sleeping. Erwin and his mother adored little animals and, though...

In Shandong, someone sticks a plastic tube through the cow’s nostril and into its stomach, then pours water. The animal collapses, limbs dangling skyward, belly swollen. Docile black eyes stare out in terror. These eyes, this belly will soon explode, but the man who pours water in the cow is still laughing.   Translation of “Bao zha de niu” Copyright Yang Zi. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2010 by Fiona Sze-Lorain, Ye Chun, and...

A man of small stature finds a monumental way to compensate for his inferiority complex.    Part I You wouldn’t notice it in the daylight. Instead, you’d be distracted by the bustling streets (perhaps by a tow truck, a crippled street vendor, a cab you’d hail, your eyes flitting between cab-top advertisements). Looking up is a hassle anyway. You’d have to crane your neck, tilt your nostrils helplessly upward, exposing them to the drip of window AC...

The descriptions in this book of the characteristics and behavior of ball lightning are based on historical records. Prelude I only remembered that it was my birthday after Mom and Dad lit the candles on the cake and we sat down around fourteen small tongues of flame. The storm that night made it seem as if the whole universe held nothing but the rapid flashes of lightning and our small room. Electric blue bursts froze the rain into solid drops for an instant, forming dense strings...

From the series "Eternal Sorrow," by Wu Wenjian With the help of two artist friends, I recently met Wu Wenjian, a worker-turned-painter, at the 798 Arts Factory, a thriving colony of studios and art galleries converted from old factories and warehouses, in Beijing's Chaoyang District. It was a sunny day. Wu was dressed in a blazing red shirt and seemed to be in high spirits. After a brief chat, we went to a nearby restaurant that served food from Northeastern China to conduct the...

Wang Dan was a leader of the 1989 student pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square. Following the government crackdown on June 4, Wang, who was on the government's most wanted list, went into hiding. He was arrested in 1990 and sentenced to four years imprisonment in 1991. After being released on parole in 1993, Wang wrote publicly about the pro-democracy movement to overseas publications and was rearrested in 1995 for conspiring to overthrow the Communist Party. He was sentenced in...

I learned the lines of this noun one bright day in the classroom. That evening I saw its black wings detach from the sky and descend in circles like a parachute toward us, my sister and me, to cover our bodies. Oh, my sister came out from under the walnut tree that stood in the yard, slowly, carefully walking into her bedroom, right into the mouth of a giant crow. Later, far from home, among demolished houses, on my heart's wall, I saw a squadron of crows suddenly take...

A blizzard lures us toward Poland, bringing us almost to the border. We should have turned north at Dresden, instead headed due East, to halt in open farmland whose sound is the lightest of rumbles. Later, filling up in a prison town, I realize we never noticed the Chopin on the radio. Read the author's "Sinologist"

To leave the airport is to feel you've got off at the wrong stop. Where are the pavilions to drink rice wine in, the suburbs of love, the policemen using their rifles to lift skirts up with, the student to say that all books are useless? But when a first round of skittles is finished, one player tells the other: Disputed decisions shouldn't spoil our sauna. All evening long they try to beat each other at losing. How disturbing that grief of incomprehension must...

We see so much that is strange. Moonshine and brief lightning flash across fish and algae in the river. Birds on the banks land and leave, transporting mud and twigs. The air is fresh. Birth, growth and death orbit around us. Read the author's "Crow"

If we sit side by side now, and say nothing for a whole half hour, and you say only that we get on fine without words, and you move away a little, for a good look at the grave almost opposite us, and you roll your eyes at me, because the dead are not to be laughed at, and you'll sit alone on the bench I'm sitting on, I'll be opposite you, opposite you, lying prone. Read the author's "Made in the Rain"

Translator's Note: China has always been an agricultural society. In spite of recent industrial development, the majority of Chinese are officially identified as farmers, holding what is called the "nong ye hu kou" (farmer's resident status). Rural China has received much less attention than cities in China's modernization process. Farmers are facing a changing world where their traditional lifestyle is challenged as they often have to leave for the cities to make a living....

Translator's Note: China has always been an agricultural society. In spite of recent industrial development, the majority of Chinese are officially identified as farmers, holding what is called the "nong ye hu kou" (farmer's resident status). Rural China has received much less attention than cities in China's modernization process. Farmers are facing a changing world where their traditional lifestyle is challenged as they often have to leave for the cities to make a living....

Translator's Note: China has always been an agricultural society. In spite of recent industrial development, the majority of Chinese are officially identified as farmers, holding what is called the "nong ye hu kou" (farmer's resident status). Rural China has received much less attention than cities in China's modernization process. Farmers are facing a changing world where their traditional lifestyle is challenged as they often have to leave for the cities to make a living....

Translator's Note: China has always been an agricultural society. In spite of recent industrial development, the majority of Chinese are officially identified as farmers, holding what is called the "nong ye hu kou" (farmer's resident status). Rural China has received much less attention than cities in China's modernization process. Farmers are facing a changing world where their traditional lifestyle is challenged as they often have to leave for the cities to make a living....

Translator's Note: China has always been an agricultural society. In spite of recent industrial development, the majority of Chinese are officially identified as farmers, holding what is called the "nong ye hu kou" (farmer's resident status). Rural China has received much less attention than cities in China's modernization process. Farmers are facing a changing world where their traditional lifestyle is challenged as they often have to leave for the cities to make a living....

Translator's Note: China has always been an agricultural society. In spite of recent industrial development, the majority of Chinese are officially identified as farmers, holding what is called the "nong ye hu kou" (farmer's resident status). Rural China has received much less attention than cities in China's modernization process. Farmers are facing a changing world where their traditional lifestyle is challenged as they often have to leave for the cities to make a living....

In the summer of 1989, I was assigned to work in an electrical engineering company in Nanjing. My train pulled in at one in the afternoon, and as I walked out of the station—two big bags slung over my shoulder—I was ambushed by a mob of peasant girls delegated by hotels to pester for business. The sweat was pouring off me, and I was not in the mood. Get lost, I told them, I live here, I don't need a hotel. The clueless cousin of mine who'd said he'd come and meet me...

1 She woke in the middle of the night to cook rice. Couldn't sleep. She was lying on the bed, eyes closed, but she hadn't the slightest sensation of sleepiness. He slept quite well beside her. When you are insomniac, the person slumbering next to you is like a curse. She rolled over, got up, and sat at the edge of the bed. Then she lay back down, and rolled over. He was completely insensible. In life not only are birth and death solitary, but so is sleep, and even insomnia. Then...

The river was as wide as a lake, a sea, or a plain. The village at the foot of distant mountains over the river would have seemed more illusory had it not been for a few green dots on the bank—lonely willow trees that brought the distant village nearer. Water as smooth as brocade flowed with boundless dignity toward somewhere over the horizon. The poor village on this side of the river had seventy-odd households, their shabby stone houses scattered along the slope. Yak dung...

A-Gump had already been called A-Gump.1 At that time, the American movie Forrest Gump wasn't around yet. However, nobody knew about this. If A-Gump didn't mention it, nobody would know. Among all the people who called her A-Gump, everyone assumed that first there was the male A-Gump in Forrest Gump, followed by her, the female A-Gump. Basically nobody had doubts about the name of A-Gump. A-Gump, however, always had lots of doubts. Really, even if she hadn't been talking...

I first got to know Wang Jianan and Cai Xiaoli when I was in England. Wang Jianan can't stop talking, life in his mouth becomes a joke. Cai Xiaoli, on the other hand, hardly speaks at all, and doesn't spend much time contemplating life. She comes from an artist family and the only thing she cares about is her art; in dealing with people, she is totally straightforward. They graduated from the Fine Arts Academy at the same time, got married, and had a child. It is said that when...

I am a countrywoman. This year, I'm thirty-six years old. My name is Chen Wumi. This name isn't very pleasing to hear, but the Beijing reporter Guo Wangjing was charmed by my name. He said that my name seems Western, that Russians and Albanians have people called Wumi, and that the Qiang, one of China's ethnic minorities, have people called Wumi too. Reporter Guo was just flattering me. In fact, he didn't realize the implications of Wumi. He was twentysomething years old and...

At the time, young wives in our village didn't have regular names. Add the word "xiao"–young–in front of their maiden names, that's how they'd be called: "Xiao Qian," "Xiao Sun," "Xiao Ma." After they had borne children, it would then be all right to call them "so-and-so's ma," such as "Xiaomei's ma," "Liu Ping's ma." Only Wang Hanfang, everybody called her by her own name. Wang Hanfang was Sun Shaozhou's wife. Sun Shaozhou's father was Sun...

Wang Longguan repaired bicycles on the street, and Fan Qiumian supported a large family on her meager income. They met on the street and fell in love. Could it last, a love that came about between these two and under such stricken circumstances? Wang Longguan set up his bicycle repair stall at a small crossroad on a side street. He was grateful to those people who let him get an official permission to set up shop, only five months after he lost his job. And he was quite satisfied with...

Dong Putao hadn't been at work long when a shadow passed over the door. It was a man with a broad, slightly open mouth who, with a single movement, glided into the store like a shark. Ripples spread from the doorframe as water slid back from both sides, showing off the bright slickness of his skin. The shark's stomach was huge, giving the impression he was colossal. A purple T-shirt was tucked into his navy blue pants; the crocodile logo on his belt buckle glinted. It reminded...

A dream is not a dream A butterfly not a butterfly In the cloud, a pining spirit A myth in the dream's red chamber It's dawn. Our cruise ship has passed the roaring Qutang Gorge and entered Wushan on the Yangtze. The deck is finally empty after an all-night party of drinking and gambling. I sneak past the sleeping guard to do yoga on the area reserved for the first-class passengers. When I look up from a back bending, she appears before me like an apparition, her slender...

Beijing's cab drivers are the best in the world. They don't accept tips, and if the drive is at all less than direct, they always eat the loss themselves. They start the meter only after the cab has gotten to the main drag and before it pulls to a stop, the meter is already down. The radio is often on in the cab. Most drivers are Beijing locals and they love xiangsheng, a traditional form of two-person stand-up comedy. One never gets tired of the old pieces; not only are they...

The novel is the only place for a great many of life's truths. Because it is only in fiction that certain facts can be held up to the light. The novel it is, then, for this particular truth. The story I'm about to tell, you see, bears some resemblance to real characters and events. Or—if I may put it this way: life has imitated art, re-rehearsing the plot of Serve the People! Wu Dawang, Sergeant of the Catering Squad, now General Orderly for the Division Commander and...

Flying over God's mountains, canyons, wastelands glimmering with foxfire, graveyards where owls vanish and appear, you drop from the stars like a soul being born, and still bearing the toxins of your own world, glide down to whatever destiny awaits. Dawn struggles up from the torn clouds of houses, yet even a miserable village twitters at sunrise, the trees filled with magpies, the river with sewage— here's someone's adopted city, another's hometown....

even ants tremble at nightfall even stones suffer insomnia even moonlight's so polluted men's shadows thin to mist even the mountaintop swells as if ready to blow even the Tang Dynasty fell into decline even in the trashcan people are living even optimists are uncertain how to live even men with fallen shoulders want to leave home even the tiger was beaten down by Wu Song even Wu Song can be scourged for his crimes and put in chains even the law has holes even...

So many things follow us like the moon, listening for our primal cries. We stop, it stops, while thirty miles ahead bright moonlight floods the brain of a wild animal. Grief rushes through its sorrows. Now is the moment to shake the moon from our track, yet like a dead friend's soul it slips into my six-square-meter room. If I can't plant my fingerprints on the moon, who's to say it exists? The mad still dance in moonlight, old women in alleys wrap their...

The first ten years of my life, as the moon exposed its silent craters to my small city far below, the streets filled with shouts, gongs and drums drove out devils, my lame uncle cursed in the yard, and careless, I got kissed by the white rooster's beak. A little girl pulled her pants down before me, and once I ran into the ghost of a suicide on the stairs, but my father raised me high overhead and told me not to fear. Hailstones bounced their lives out on the walk to the...

“On the surface her work seems influenced by writers like Kafka, Borges, and Calvino, but according to her, she has also learned the art of fiction from many classical Western writers, such as Shakespeare and Dante . . . Can Xue doesn’t trust reason and always follows her instinct in writing fiction.”—Ha Jin   I finally got rid of my cat. I thought this would enable me to start a new life. I sat at the table, eyes shut, thinking hard. I tried to tidy up my...

Wu Quan was a character. Everyone in Jingzhen enjoyed poking fun at him. He was born short and small, with eyes, nose, and mouth huddled together on a face that belonged to the masses. Sporting a trademark mole on the tip of his nose, he would walk as if on tiptoe. He was, however, by no means a cowardly character. Just go ask around and you'll soon find out the many tricks up his sleeve. He had a very attractive wife who bore him five children. The two were inseparable. If someone...

The setting is inside the mortuary of a hospital in an African country at war, Angola. Two corpses are covered by white sheets. In the original play, the text in italics is spoken in English, and otherwise the text is spoken in Cantonese. Scene One [The curtain opens, pitch black darkness, the sound of banging on doors.] Dr. Li: Damn! Damn! Damn! [banging on the doors] Open the door! Sam! Sam! Are you guys there? Open the door! Shit --- [Lights up, an exhausted old doctor, a...

Time: 2004 Place: In a corner of West Kowloon Characters: Voice - the "inner voice" of various main characters Tze Seun Wong - real estate agent, about 50 yrs old, deals mainly with old run-down Chinese-style buildings Cindy - an extremely intelligent 28 yr-old young lady, with a mature sensuousness Jason - a college student, just turned 19, innocent with a sunny disposition Plus a small ensemble cast of ten which includes the roles of Owner, Prostitute, Colleague, Daughter, Garbage Lady...

My little boy pulls my coat as if he's asking "Why did you take so long to get back home? who were you fighting with all those months and years just to win that prize of snow-white hair?"

1 So slender and so graceful not much more than thirteen the tip of a cardamom branch in spring just about to bud ten miles down the Yangzhou road and the spring winds were blowing lots of women since, bead curtains lifting, but never like that again. 2 Too much love somehow became no love at all over this farewell bottle we can't manage even a friendly smile only the candle seems to be able to generate some feeling all night it weeps little wax tears.

Ha Jin has this to say about Gao Ertai's work: "Among numerous memoirs by Chinese authors, In Search of My Homeland stands out as an eloquent testimony to the violation and destruction of humanity. This revered scholar of aesthetic theories has written not only about his personal suffering in the remote labor camps and the political persecution he and his family experienced, but also about the fates of many common people. His style is fortified by concision, elegance, restraint, and...

The cold river spreads boundless away. Autumn rains darken azure-deep skies. You ask about WholeSouth Mountain: the mind knows beyond white clouds. From Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China, forthcoming from New Directions.