Borderlands

Down from the Mountains

Joshua Bird

China’s Muslim Dongxiang minority emerge from isolation – Joshua Bird

“Be sure to try the potatoes, they are world famous,” encouraged Mr. Ma, the owner of the newest restaurant in Dongxiang City, home of the Dongxiang ethnic minority in the Linxia Autonomous Prefecture of Gansu Province. As he hovered over us, his first customers, we dared not disappoint him.

We had endured two hour’s drive up and down the dizzying roads that snaked through the high mountains encircling Dongxiang City in western China, which – complemented by the Yellow, Lintao and Daxia Rivers – had provided the city and its people with a comforting isolation over the centuries. Yet while the mountains have allowed the Dongxiang minority to preserve their unique cultural and religious identity, it has also left them relatively ill equipped to take advantage of China’s economic growth.

Q&A

Translating Tibetan Literature

Kevin McGeary

Kevin McGeary talks to Tsering Döndrup’s translator, Christopher Peacock

Christopher Peacock is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, and translator from the Tibetan of The Handsome Monk and Other Stories, a collection of fiction by Tsering Döndrup. Born in 1961 in Qinghai, a Tibetan area of China, Döndrup began writing in the early 1980s and has published many collections of short fiction and four full-length novels. His work has been translated into several languages, and he is the recipient of a number of Tibetan, Mongolian and nationwide literary prizes in China. I talked to Christopher Peacock about Döndrup’s work and the state of Tibetan literature.

How did you become involved with Tsering Döndrup and The Handsome Monk?    

Initially, because I was researching his short story ‘Ralo.’ I was aware that several Tibetan critics had compared it to Lu Xun’s ‘The True Story of Ah Q,’ and this fit very closely with my interest in Tibetan adaptations of Chinese literary discourse. I interviewed the author about the story, and later I translated it for my own use. As I read more of his work, I became interested in putting together a whole collection.

Reviews

Socialist Literature for the Capitalist Era

Dylan Levi King

Dylan Levi King reviews Empires of Dust by Jiang Zilong

Jiang Zilong’s novel Empires of Dust, newly translated by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne, is unlike anything else published in translation from Chinese in the past decade or so. Jiang, a 78-year-old native of Hebei Province, made a name for himself with A Day in the Life of the Chief of the Electrical Equipment Bureau (机电局长的一天), a 1976 novella first criticized for revisionism and then praised as the future of Chinese literature. Decades later, in 2008, came Empires of Dust (农民帝国), a sprawling epic of modern Chinese history that can only be defined as capitalist realism.

Jiang comes from the same literary background that produced established names such as Mo Yan, Yan Lianke and Jia Pingwa. All of those writers got their start with politically-approved hack work, too. But while they went in other directions, Jiang Zilong continued to write in a literary style codified in the 1950s. Although he published most of his major works in the 1980s and 1990s, and Empires of Dust in the mid-2000s, Jiang is something of a living literary fossil. To understand his work, one has to step back to the era of socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism.

Dispatches

Larkin in the Middle Kingdom

Elyse Weingarten

They fuck you up, your poetry teachers – Elyse Weingarten

When I entered the classroom, I expected it to be abuzz with joy. Instead, the students filed in silently, looking at their phones until class began, and then remained characteristically taciturn. It was my second year living in Beijing and teaching at a university. For weeks, I had been looking forward to teaching British poet Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’ to the Chinese undergraduate English majors in my creative writing class. They had read the poem as part of their assignment before the class. I had assumed they’d delight in the poem’s mischievousness and musicality, like so many of their Western counterparts before them. I thought I’d finally elicit enthusiasm from them. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Dispatches

Trickle-down Economics with Chinese Characteristics

Matt Chitwood

For rural Chinese, economic reform is worth the 40-year wait – Matt Chitwood

President Xi Jinping’s New Era was ushered in by a new cast of characters: ballerinas in pink tutus, laborers in yellow hardhats, hip-hop dancers in silver foil Hammer pants and a girl in pigtails. The new proletariat took center stage in Beijing last December to ring in the 40th anniversary of China’s Reform and Opening. Their highly choreographed number, ‘Enter the New Era,’ was just one of dozens in a nationally televised epic production that paid tribute to the economic reforms championed by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, and now Xi, that have paved the way for China’s prosperity.