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November 2015: Li Jingrui 李静睿

Li jingrui

Li Jingrui was a journalist for eight years, reporting on legal affairs in China. She resigned in 2012 and turned to other forms of writing, including her own column in the Chinese edition of The Wall Street Journal. She now mostly concentrates on writing fiction. She has published a collection of short stories Tales of a Small Town, also a novel Small Town Girl, in which she tries to explore human feelings and fate, without steering clear of sensitive subjects. Her stories may be about the everyday lives of ordinary people in a small town in Sichuan, or about students exiled in New York after Tian’anmen.

(Bio from Paper Republic)

The story we've chosen for this month's book club is 'Missing' (失踪). translated by Helen Wang. The story deals with an unexplained disappearance of a woman's husband, and the escalating strangeness around it.

Li Jingrui was the featured author on Read Paper Republic, August 6th 2015. We'd like to thank the Paper Republic team, and translator Helen Wang, for giving us permission to reprint her story here.

You can also read another of her stories, 'A Quiet Winter', translated by Nicholas Richards, on 'The World of Chinese'. Part one is here and part two here.