Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
EXILES
Chinese authors living overseas, either through choice or because of their political views, have been responsible
for some of the most effective writing about China in recent years. The London-based Ma Jian left China after
the Tiān'ānmén protests. His novel
Beijing Coma
(2008), which recounts the events of June 1989 from the per-
spective of a student left in a coma after being shot during the crackdown on the protestors, is the finest piece of
fiction dealing with that momentous time.
Ma's masterpiece, though, is the remarkable
Red Dust
(2001), a memoir of the three years in the early 1980s
Ma spent travelling around the remote edges of China, including Tibet, on the lam. Its opening chapters provide
a fascinating snapshot of the then tiny community of bohemians in Běijīng and the suspicions they aroused
among the authorities.
Native Beijinger Yiyun Li, who now lives in California, writes exquisite short stories. Both
A Thousand
Years of Good Prayers
(2005) and
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
(2010) reveal the lives of ordinary Chinese caught
up in the sweeping cultural changes of the past 20 years and are told in haunting prose.
Another US-based author who writes in English is Ha Jin. His novel
Waiting
(1999) is a love story that spans
two decades as its hero hangs on 18 years for official permission to get divorced so he can remarry. The harsher,
more satirical
War Trash
(2004) examines the complicated web of loyalties - to family, country and political
party - many Chinese struggled to reconcile in the wake of the communist takeover of China in 1949.
Zhang went on to write the novels
Heavy Wings
(1980) and
The Ark
(1981).
The Ark,
about three women separated from their husbands, established Zhang as China's 'first
feminist author'. Shen Rong was another talented female author. Her novella
At Middle
Age
(1980), tells the plight of a Chinese intellectual during the Cultural Revolution who
must balance her family life with her career as a doctor.
If in town in March, get your literary fix at the International Literary Festival, held at the
Bookworm. Numerous local and international authors are invited to talk, with a line-up that
seems to grow more distinguished each year - another sign of Běijīng's emergence as a true
world city.
Post-1989 Literature
The tragic events of 1989 inspired a more 'realist' type of literature and paved the way for
a new group of writers, such as Wang Shuo and Yu Hua, to emerge. Wang, a sailor turned
fiction writer, is famous for his satirical stories about China's underworld and political
corruption.
