For all you booklovers out there, a friend sent me this article from the San Francisco Chronicle about a new Chinese writer. Another book for us to keep an eye out for...
Novel crosses cultures, generations -- and so does China's burgeoning publishing industry
Olivia Wu, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, October 21, 2006 (10-21) 04:00 PST Beijing -- When Fan Wu was feverishly tapping out her first novel in San Jose four years ago, she did not imagine she would star in the launch of a major publishing house. At the 13th Annual Beijing Book Fair, Macmillan Press announced the formation of Picador Asia, its newest imprint dedicated to the Asia Pacific region -- the only Asian list created by a mainstream English language publisher -- and brought out its first book, "February Flowers," by Chinese-born Wu. Wu (no relation to this reporter) wrote the novel in English partly to challenge herself in her second language.
Publishers from around the world arrived at the book fair, one of the major publishing events in China, earlier this month to search for, develop and publish Chinese writers. Major houses, such as Penguin and HarperCollins, continued to press forward with translations of English classics into Chinese and emphasis on children's books. More than 4,000 local and international publishers turned up.
Many consider the greatest loophole in Chinese-English publishing efforts to be contemporary Chinese voices in English. HarperCollins' president and chief executive, Jane Friedman, announced that it was partnering with the Chinese People's Literature Publishing House to translate books by Chinese authors and distribute them overseas.
Literary agent Toby Eady of London, who brought Wu's "February Flowers" to Macmillan, maintains that the reason so few contemporary Chinese authors are read in the West, and the reason modern China is so little understood by the West, is the dearth of good translations of contemporary Chinese writers. Wu, 33, overrode the problem by writing in English.
Wu is employed as a global research analyst at Yahoo in Santa Clara. She came to the United States nine years ago for graduate studies at Stanford and was hired by Yahoo as soon as she graduated. Immersed in the high-tech corporate structure, she felt suffocated.
"Eventually, literature came back to claim me," she said. Although she received offers by investors to come back to China to start Internet businesses, she turned them down. A onetime student poet whose father was a poet whose career was curtailed by the Cultural Revolution, Wu knew her first love was literature.
She felt her English was poor, and she landed in America hungry to read American writers. She scoured books by Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, John Cheever and J. D. Salinger. Unlike her colleagues who ate, slept and read engineering, she gave her free time to American literature. In 2002, she began "February Flowers," the coming-of-age story of two university students in southern China in the 1990s. More important, it is about youth in a rapidly changing China in which the generation gap spans centuries and oceans.
"The generation gap can never be filled," says Wu. "You always live in your parents' past. You can move on, but there's a price. You can never forget the past."
The two main characters in the book are 17-year-old Ming, who is innocent and bookish, and 24-year-old Miao Yan, a wild yet worldly woman from the Miao ethnic minority. They become best friends, but because of their history and parents, go their separate ways, each keeping her past a secret from the other. It is a story of loss, a theme in the forward-hurtling culture of China and globalization.
Love and redemption may be a part of the story but are only hinted at because the effects of rapid development and mobilization are cloudy. In modernization, China is losing much. "You lose your friendships or innocence. You can never get it back," says Wu.
Wu grew up on a state-run farm in southern China where her parents were exiled during the Cultural Revolution. Although the family was poor, she said, she had a life in which she was in touch with nature. There, despite the sometimes despicable acts committed in the name of the Cultural Revolution, her family experienced kindness.
"People were genuine to each other on the farm. People would lend my parents money. People gave us rice and food." That face of China is fast disappearing, and doesn't exist in its urban, materialistic cities now, she says.
Although poor, she could escape to her father's library. A former writer and teacher sent to the countryside to be "reformed," he kept his books, and young Wu immersed herself in translations of Russian classics such as "War and Peace." At the same time, she consumed a steady diet of heavy, guilt-laden Chinese works called "scar literature." As an impressionable teenager, she thought all novels had that heavy tone, and she couldn't contemplate writing in such a dense, emotional style.
It wasn't until she came to America that she realized a novel did not have to read like Tolstoy. In America she also found openness, a willingness among diverse Asian women to talk intimately about their upbringing. She realized there were universal themes: the prison of parental love and expectations, and male-dominant values.
She borrowed from her own experiences for both of her main character. "Deep down, both girls represent the same person. They're misfits and they wonder if they ever dare to claim their independence," Wu said. Once she and her friends left home and found themselves at a university, especially in the more progressive south, it "was the first time we could smell freedom," she said.
Once in the United States, she could acknowledge her own rage and rebellion. Now she also recognizes that she cannot change her parents. They loved their children and made unswerving sacrifices, but they could not show their love except to continue to be mute about how they had suffered.
In America, Wu chose to reach out rather than stay within the tight cliques of Chinese students.
"When you move to a (new) culture, you're not just a taker. You have to be a giver." So many Chinese feel such a loss of confidence that they retreat, especially when they find themselves stereotyped. "I say to them, 'A lot of times you create the stereotype,' " Wu said.
She gave herself the task of learning not only the language but the culture because "the more you understand another culture, the more you know your own culture. All our literary greats, for example Lu Hsun, understood other cultures," she said.
"February Flowers" was rejected by several American agents, who asked Wu to change the tone and the ending of the book because it was too subtle. "I told them if I change it, it would be an American book about American Chinese," said Wu.
Eady, the British agent who represented Wu, claims that Americans are not interested in contemporary Chinese writers. "They think Chinese is Amy Tan."
Eady, who brought Jung Chang's "Wild Swans" and Xinran's "The Good Women of China" out in English, has been one of the few agents to sell contemporary Chinese voices by insisting on hiring translators who speak and write Chinese and who are native English speakers. He is a publishing consultant to Picador Asia. Most translations of Chinese authors fail because they are done by academics who render the Chinese into strict English, and worse, "with a tin ear," he says.
The seminal "Wild Swans," a story of three generations of Chinese women, took seven years to write and translate, with Eady himself involved in the translation process. It has sold 10 million copies.
Eady says the book still has lukewarm sales in the United States, in contrast with Australia, where it first took off. He says that's because of the governmental policy of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s, who introduced Asian languages into Australia's school curricula. Today, Australia is the biggest English-reading market for Asian authors. Picador Asia is based in Sydney and Hong Kong.
In "February Flowers," Picador already had an original English version of a Chinese author. Wu has just finished translating it into Chinese herself. However, as she continues to write she vows to do so in Chinese. "It's such a hard language, if you don't use it, you forget it.
"Besides, Chinese is such a beautiful language."
"February Flowers" is published by Picador Asia and is available in Asia and Australia. It will be published in the United Kingdom in the spring. To buy a copy, try the Australian Web site:
www.paddyfield.com/mainstore. E-mail Olivia Wu at owu@sfchronicle.com.