Modern Chinese Literature Online Book Club - Session 9

Please join us for the 9th session of our Modern Chinese literature online book club on Friday January 17th 2025, 1-2pm (UK time)/ 9-10pm (Beijing time). All are welcome to attend and you do not need to have attended any of our prior book club sessions. The session is informal, friendly and held in English.

In this next session, we'll be discussing Ying Yang Alley by Fan Xiaoqing 范小青 , translated by Helen Wang. You can read the short story in English here: https://paper-republic.org/pubs/read/ying-yang-alley/.
The chinese version is available to read here. 

About the facilitators:

Nicky Harman: Nicky Harman lives in the UK and translates full-time from Chinese into English, focussing on fiction, literary non-fiction, and occasionally poetry. In 2020, she won a Special Book Award of China. Several of her translations have been recipients of an English PEN Translates award and she has won a Mao Tai Cup People's Literature Chinese-English translation prize (2015), and first prize in the 2013 China International Translation Contest, Chinese-to-English section, with Jia Pingwa’s Backflow River (倒 流河) .

Emily Jones: Emily Jones is a founding Trustee of Paper Republic, a charity which promotes Chinese literature in English translation. She is a graduate of Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge (1998 - 2002). She also studied Chinese at the Chinese universities of Ningbo and Qingdao and was the recipient of a British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship in translation in 2011. Her publications include novels such as Black Holes (性之罪 ) by He Jiahong (何家弘); short stories such as Fiction and Other Stories (李喬短篇小說精選集) by Lee Chiao (李喬), as well as poetry.

Helen Wang: Helen Wang lives in London. Her most recent translations are Lu Min's novel Dinner for Six (co-translated with Nicky Harman, Balestier Press, 2022) and Yang Zhihan's short story Hai Shan Swimming Pool (Granta, 2024). She is also known for her translations of children's books, including Bronze and Sunflower by Cao Wenxuan (Walker Books, 2015), and founded Chinese Books for Young Readers in 2016.

The following questions will be discussed at the session:

1. How does this story compare with other Chinese stories you have read?

2. There is not much description - can you picture the setting and the characters in your mind? 

3. Can you relate to the characters in the story? In what ways? 

3. There is a lot of dialogue - why do you think the author chose to use so much dialogue? What effect does it have?

4. There is a gentleness and humour to this story. How does the author achieve this gentleness and humour?

Please register here on Eventbrite to attend. 

The session will be held on MS Teams. The link to join on the day will be sent out to you in advance.