Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
» Empress Orchid (Anchee Min, 2004) Historical novel about Empress Cixi and her rise to empress of China
during the last days of the Qing dynasty. Good historical background of Běijīng and entertaining to read.
» Beijing: A Novel (Philip Gambone, 2003) A well-written account of an American working in a medical clinic
in Běijīng who falls in love with a local artist. One of the few books out there to explore in-depth the intricacies
of Běijīng gay subculture.
» Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China (Rachel Dewoskin, 2005) An easygoing account
of a young woman's five years spent in Běijīng during the mid-1990s.
The Birth of Modern Chinese Literature
The publication of Lu Xun's short story Diary of a Madman in 1918 had the same type of
effect on Chinese literature as the leather-clad Elvis Presley had on the American music
scene in the early 1950s. Until Lu Xun, novels had been composed in classical Chinese
(gǔwén) , a kind of Shakespearean language far removed from colloquial speech (báihuà)
. That maintained the huge gulf between educated and uneducated Chinese, putting literat-
ure beyond the reach of the common person and fashioning a cliquey lingua franca for of-
ficials and scholars.
The opening paragraph of Lu's seminal story uses that classical language. The stultify-
ing introduction - peppered with archaic character use and the excruciatingly pared down
grammar of classical Chinese - continues as one solid block of text, without any new
paragraphs or indentation. Then suddenly the passage concludes and the reader is confron-
ted with the appearance of fluent colloquial - spoken - Chinese:
Tonight there is good moonlight
For Lu Xun to write his short story - itself a radical fable of palpable terror - in the ver-
nacular was dynamite. Chinese people were at last able to read language as it was spoken
and the short story's influence on creative expression was electric. Lu Xun's tale records
the diary entries of a man descending into paranoia and despair. Fearful that those around
him are engaging in cannibalism, the man's terrifying suspicions are seen as a critique of
the self-consuming nature of feudal society. It is a haunting and powerful work, which in-
stils doubts as to the madness of the narrator and concludes with lines that offer a glimmer
of hope.
From this moment on, mainstream Chinese literature would be written as it was thought
and spoken: Chinese writing had arrived in the modern age.
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