Modern Online Chinese Literature Book Club - Session 4

Please join us for the fourth session of our Online Modern Chinese Literature Book Club. The sessions are informal, fun and held in English.

In this next session, we will discuss the story Backflow River by Jia Pingwa and translated by Nicky Harman.

Read the translated text here

Read the original Chinese story here

Jia Pingwa (1952- ) stands with Mo Yan and Yu Hua as one of the biggest names in contemporary Chinese literature. His fiction focuses on the lives of common people, particularly in his home province of Sha'anxi, and is well-known for being unafraid to explore the realm of the sexual.

Backflow River is a fascinating, humorous story, with a very unexpected twist at the end.

Please consider the following questions before the session:

1. Backflow River is the story of the Opening up of the economy and society in China from the 1990s onwards and how it affects one couple. It’s a rags to riches and back to rags again story. What small details stand out to you (if any)?

2. Focussing on the woman of the couple, Shun Shun, how important do you think she is to the way we engage with the story? Can you imagine the story working the same way if she was not there?

3. There is a sub-story, which is Shun Shun’s inability to have a child. This culminates in her doing something which seems almost unimaginable. Can you trace the references to infertility? Did you grasp immediately what she does for her husband?

About the facilitators:

• Nicky Harman lives in the UK and translates full-time from Chinese into English, focussing on fiction, literary non-fiction, and occasionally poetry. 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). When not translating, she works on Paper-Republic.org, a non-profit website promoting Chinese literature in translation, where she is also a Trustee.  She was co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors, UK) from 2014 to 2017. 
• Emily Jones is a founding Trustee of Paper Republic, https://paper-republic.org/, 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) and The Sky Dwellers (天行者) by Liu Xinglong (刘醒龙); 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, and non-fiction for various publishers.

We are also delighted to welcome Dylan Levi King and Nick Stember to this session.

• Dylan Levi King is a writer and translator based in Tokyo. His most recent publication is a translation, with Nicky Harman, of Jia Pingwa's Shaanxi Opera (Amazon Crossing, 2023).
• Nick Stember is a historian and translator of Chinese literature and popular culture. He is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, and his doctoral theses is on "pulp science" in early Reform-era (1976-1986) comic books. In 2016 he completed his Master of Arts in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia with a thesis on the formation of the Shanghai Cartoon Society in the mid-1920s. 

The recording from the session is available below and the transcript is available here.