Granta 169, by various

The fast-moving pace of Zhang Yueran’s writing style was what caught my attention almost immediately. Out of the nearly eighteen pieces included in this astonishing Granta China issue, I chose to review this short story because of how it made me feel or, perhaps, because of how it didn’t make me feel. It begins as an ordinary tale – three book-loving individuals who meet by chance at a book launch. And it’s not just any book: it’s Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth. From that point on, each paragraph gains its own density, becoming almost compact, autonomous stories gathered in one place.

Dawei, Zichen, and the protagonist-narrator (whose name I couldn’t find – perhaps I am simply a distracted reader) guide us through what appears to be an unremarkable narrative. They seem like cool people with a few issues (who doesn’t?), but decent enough overall. They’re such devoted book lovers that they even create Whale, a literary magazine that dies before it is ever born. It’s this determination, this utopia shared by people who feel misunderstood, like live fish out of water, that keeps me reading the story.

But suddenly all of that – the unusual friendship formed overnight and the almost cheap idealism – evolves into something strange, as strange as the relationships between them, which seems like love, but not quite. They are all a bit like each of us: half normal, largely abnormal. And it is precisely this abnormality that makes them mysterious characters. It creates, at least for me, an ambivalence in my relationship with them: I can neither like nor dislike them. As I follow the story, I am simply there to witness what happens next, how far their strangeness will go.

All at once, a story about three book lovers – who live on utopias I’m not even sure they themselves believe in – turns almost into a crime thriller. Their obsession with literature pushes them towards irrationality as they try to uncover the identity of Hai Tong, a mysterious writer. As a reader, I found that this part of the story reflects Zhang Yueran’s own obsession with literature. In an inadvertent and very subtle way, the author urges us to question our pre-conceived ideas of what good literature is, proposing the ‘weird’, the ‘unstructured’, the ‘unpolished’, the ‘unfinished’, the ‘undone’ as new frames through which to explore the power of art.

For me, Speedwell is as much about this incomprehensible obsession with storytelling – which so many of us share – as it is about rediscovering how powerful literature can be in mediating universal conversations and understandings. As an Angolan who honestly knows very little about Chinese literature, Zhang Yueran’s short story feels like an open door into contemporary Chinese fiction. Her patience and care with language are felt throughout. Beyond being repeatedly transported into her scenes, I often found myself either laughing or inadvertently shouting out loud as new events unfolded. That is what good literature does: it unlocks unexpected traits and behaviours. Honestly, this is a damn great story, full of ghosts, weird surprises and, above all, rich and irresistible utopias.

Reviewed by Israel Campos

‘Speedwell’ is a poignant yet mesmerizing tale about the bankruptcy of utopian literary dreams. The story begins with the first-person narrator’s encounter with Dawei and Zichen at a bookstore event for Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evening on Earth and their first coffee chat about literature. In a deft stroke, the author portrays the three main characters as idealistic and high-minded lovers of literature, and sets up the stage for the main plotline of the story: the trio’s crazy search for Hai Tong, the enigmatic author of the censured novel The Pleiades. In order to find out who Hai Tong is, the three leave no stone unturned. But the harder they try, the more elusive she seems to become.

The story is also a riddle about exorcism and summoning of demons. The search for Hai Tong can be interpreted as a mystic ritual for evoking ghosts. As long as the narrator remains invested in her literary dreams and committed to the search, she is able to conjure up the ghost of a sailor—a character from her unfinished novel who is from Joseph Conrad’s era—and has uncanny conversations with him either in dreams or fantasies. In fact, she is haunted by the ghost, which constantly reminds her of the unfinished novel and stirs her creative sensibilities. But more than anything else, it is the phantom of the mysterious author that beckons the narrator and her friends forward, instilling their otherwise empty lives with meaning and significance. In this sense, the search for Hai Tong becomes both the means of sustaining and protecting their fragile literary dreams and a weapon with which they defend themselves against philistinism and political encroachment. Moreover, it becomes a rallying cry that unites the three kindred spirits, dispelling their sense of loneliness and giving them a distinct identity.

Yet as the truth begins to surface following Zichen’s suicide, the other two are shocked to discover that the enigmatic author they’ve been searching for all year may be none other than Zichen himself. Looking back, they now realise that the search has been orchestrated by Zichen all along, probably as a token of his commitment to high-minded literary pursuits, which ultimately leads to his death. The narrator and Dawei’s sense of betrayal and disillusionment, though never voiced, is nonetheless deeply felt. At last, the moment of wakening arrives, and the process of exorcism begins. The two marry each other, and Dawei begins working at his father’s company, the very place he once dismissed as “a rubbish dump of capitalism” (18). They now throw themselves into a philistine life as ardently as they once distained it. For a short while, the ghosts seem to be banished from both their minds and their lives. Just as the narrator puts it, ‘My dreams were like pure water, filtered so many times there wasn’t a single stray thought left’.

But not for long. Nihilism and self-doubt soon set in, and for the last time, the narrator sees the ghost of the sailor. The next day, after completing her daily domestic routines she leaves home, presumably in search of a new meaning in life. But ‘[o]ut of nowhere, I felt homesick for the place I’d left, though I couldn’t have said what it was I missed.’ She soon returns home, only to find a woman sitting by the cot, telling her baby a story in a low voice. She declares herself to be Hai Tong. All those unanswered riddles race through the narrator’s mind, but all she says is ‘Please leave. This is my home.’ She then ‘sat by the window, tucked Yangping’s bear into his arm, and looked down at [her] sleeping child.’ At last, she finds her purpose in life, and the ritual of banishing ghosts is finally complete.

The story is interwoven with references to other texts. The three characters clearly indicate that their search for Hai Tong is inspired by and modeled on the search of the author Benno von Archimboldi in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Beyond that, the author pays tribute to a long list of writers by cleverly weaving their characters or stylistic elements into her narrative. Perhaps most intriguing of all is the intertextuality between the story and Hai Tong’s novel—the fiction within the fiction. Speedwell, the symbolic white flower that repeatedly appears in The Pleiades, becomes the title of the story. The rich layers of intertextuality and symbolism greatly enhance the story’s depth and artistic appeal, making it a joy to read.

Overall, the story is beautifully written and elegantly translated. I truly enjoyed it!

Reviewed by Zhang Ying

Before attending Shuang Xuetao’s book club held at the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, I had little knowledge of this author, let alone any previous reading experience with his literature; and before having access to this hard copy of Granta, I wasn't aware of this quite renowned literary magazine, despite the fact that the dissemination of Chinese contemporary literature is one of my core fields of research. The double negligence led me to leaf through the Granta China issue every few nights throughout October, and the reading experience was two-fold.

To be honest, most of the fictional stories I read left little deep impression on me, despite the fact that some of the authors are really big names in China such as Yu Hua, Mo Yan and Yan Lianke, etc. Generally, I don’t feel good when reading their fiction, just as Thomas Meaney highlighted a few key words in the editor’s foreword -- “despair, darkness, euphoria” -- although the stories these famous writers create do stand for certain literary trends and embody deeper socio-cultural significance. From the perspective of a general bilingual reader, I find it hard to empathize with the characters, plots, descriptions as well as the cultural image these stories are associated with. And I sincerely doubt the opinion that the point of literature is to reveal some hidden darkness…As contemporary readers caught in the hectic maze of work and life, we still need literature in its traditional form to help us speak from the depth of our hearts.

The silver lining comes from my reading of Xiao Hai’s non-fiction piece Adrift in the South. It gives a vivid and touching account of the author’s working experience as a teenager in China’s fastest-developing metropolis, Shenzhen. It is a kind of typical record of the bitter hardship of migrant workers, but atypical because of the protagonist’s very young age of fifteen, and also because of the somewhat poetic language scattered here and there (such as, “everybody worked hard to earn their sixpence, and nobody bothered to lift their head and gaze up at the moon hanging over the industrial park.”). My primary judgment of a good story is that it enables readers to empathize with shared experiences, emotions or reflections. For the story concerned, we don’t need to be migrant workers or engage in a similar gig economy role to let our hearts bump, a similar scene or even a few words or sentences may help us recall a past experience, which we share with one another, regardless of cultures, professions, ages, genders and so on.

There are many plots or lines in this non-fiction which touch me from the depth of my heart. “It’s a place that produces the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen. Every flower is destined to wither, but the flower of my youth-which once saw full bloom in that metropolis-will forever remain the prettiest and tenderest.” The quote reminds me of a few lines in “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost (1923)

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.

Elsewhere, near the end of the writing, there’s the line: “we were all, in the not-so-distant past, authentic and irreplaceable parts of the city.” I firmly believe that great works are those which speak to you as an old friend, with ordinary utterance yet shining like a star in your heart and mind. I enjoyed reading this piece of non-fiction not because of it being a stereotypical grassroots narrative, but rather because it touches upon general themes of youth, memory, urbanization, migration from one’s hometown to other cities, growing up and so on. These are universal themes and readers will naturally project their own experience onto the protagonist’s story.

This non-fiction article also reminds me of the popular genre of “migrant worker fiction”. There’s some debate surrounding the recent piece in The Guardian entitled “The Beijing courier who went viral: how Hu Anyan wrote about delivering parcels – and became a bestseller”, and I’m not sure whether there’s some bigger picture concerning cultural image representation. All I know is that we are still living in a difficult world and we still need writers like Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, Liu Zhenyun or the emerging courier-turned-writer Hu Anyan to create fiction or non-fiction, to remind us of our shared life cycle of happiness and bitterness.

Reviewed by Lu Jing

This collection of Chinese creative writing, in translation, by contemporary mainland Chinese authors includes a diverse number of short stories,  autobiography, interviews, poems, art work and photographic essays. Min Lin, in a series  of Chinese calligraphy,  identifies a number of genres in contemporary writing. One of  these she calls ‘Bottom Rung Literature’ (diceng wenxue),  defined as ‘writing concerned with the social realities of the lowest strata of society, marginalised groups, and migrant and domestic workers’. This genre is well represented here. One particularly moving autobiographical account by Xiao Hai, Adrift in the South, describes his journey, along with other  classmates, from north China to the southern  industrial metropolis of Shenzhen. The boys are accompanied by someone they call ‘teacher’, but in reality he is a recruiting agent for Shenzhen’s burgeoning factories.  At 15, Hai is underage -   a child labourer. Exploitation is the order of the day, with working hours from 7.30am to 11.30 pm. The jobs are monotonous, boring  and relentless. ‘Machines were my only company’ (p.182). Hai spends the next 12 years  in this soul-destroying work. In retrospect he feels that his youth was wasted. Yet he can’t write it off completely -  he cultivated a love of literature and  newspapers  in one of which he  learns of the death of Leslie Cheung, the much beloved Hong Kong actor and singer. Cantonese pop music had become Hai’s spiritual life-line. ‘I always returned to my dorm with a little strength left, and with that I dreamed the simplest, sincerest, and most fervid dreams’. Hai vividly conveys the indomitable optimism of a young man  who has become one of the foremost creative authors in contemporary China.

On a number of occasions the collections refers to the ‘Dongbei renaissance’. Dongbei refers to the ‘North-East’ -   the furthest north province. In an interview for Granta, the journalist  Wu Qi, reflects on the importance of  this region as a microcosm  of the ups and downs of China’s general development:  collectivism,  heavy industry (well illustrated in this volume by Liu Haohui photographic collection), and deindustrialisation, with consequent unemployment and casualisation. Dongbei writers, says Wu,  articulate these dilemmas in a particularly direct, gritty language.  In Ban Yu’s story, Take me out to the Ball Game, the narrator is a middle school student, reflecting on his family’s struggle: ‘My dad picked the wrong time to be born’  -  he was sent to the countryside as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution; he was made redundant from his factory job as a married family man. ‘He’s always tried to ride the tide of his time - but by the time he figured out the actions to take, the ship had already sailed’. (p.120) He tries to make ends meet as a bike-taxi driver, but work is sporadic and the takings meagre. His main concern is to pay for his son’s cram-school fees.  He meets Xiao Shubin, whose son is training for the local football team in Shenyang and needs a lift to the stadium. He becomes a regular customer. Xiao is as expansive  as the narrator’s dad is reserved and cautious. Xiao asks for loans, which he doesn’t repay; eventually he ‘borrows’ the bike - and never returns it. The dad is left stranded yet again. There is no happy ending to the story. But the vigorous narrative evades pity.

One of the most humorous stories in the collection is by Yu Hua, Tomorrow I’ll get past it. It addresses both the frustrations and disappointments of being a writer, and the ambiguities of human relationships and family life. A failing author, early in his career, is rejected by a mainstream (government sponsored) publishing firm. The company Editor  has no time to discuss the potential author’s ideas about a big novel: ‘Hey, I’m not a doctor’. Moreover, the writer is distressed to find the sweeper dumping scores of unopened manuscripts into the trash bin. Not surprisingly the author’s teenaged son has little interest in pursuing a literary career, and becomes obsessed with video games. The writer is encouraged by his niece’s creative skills, but is surprised by her early remarkable success as a published writer.  One day his younger brother phones to say that his daughter is pregnant. She doesn’t have a boyfriend, but claims to have a ‘lover’. The brothers assume that this means she is having an affair with a married man.

In a hilarious exchange, each accuses the other of misleading their children -  by fostering the daughter’s literary pretensions; by  conniving in the son’s gaming addiction. Then, out of the blue,  the erstwhile Editor reappears -now showing a remarkable interest in our author’s efforts; indeed, like a ‘doctor’, advising him on what stories might evade censorship or have popular appeal. We soon find out the reason!  The story ends with the author full of optimism that, at last, he will get beyond the first chapter of that great unwritten novel. One is tempted to say: Dream on!

All in all, this is a fascinating collection of writing, ranging from magic realism and mystery in Zhang Yueren’s Speedwell, the hazards of parental pressure to get married, or at least have a steady girl/boy friend, in Wang Zhanghei’s Goodbye Bridge of the East, to the earthy realism and the humour of the stories I have already mentioned. There is little direct reference to LGBT dilemmas; nor, understandably, to controversial political themes. Two pictures vividly encapsulate the collection as a whole: a maquette of a modern urban landscape, constructed out of books; and a picture of a bookstore, crammed with books to the ceiling. Its good to know from this collection that creative writing is flourishing in China.

Reviewed by Kevin Ward

When I first started reading "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", Ban Yu was already known to me as one of the most distinctive literary authors from Northeast China after the decline of state-owned enterprises. His stories are rarely about suspense or mystery and try to capture the muted sorrow and fragile dignity of people's survival. And that's why I chose this story, as I was curious to see how literature could represent the atmosphere of the laid-off generation. I was impressed by Tony Hao’s translation. His language is plain, restrained, and precise, echoing Ban Yu’s understated style. Phrases like ‘they were practicing tai chi before quickly wrapping their warm palms around their cheeks' or ‘wind swirled in the tunnel.... blowing garbage, rainwater and fallen leaves into the air’ carry the same sense of bleak poetry as in Chinese. The translation opens a door for readers unfamiliar with the Chinese rust belt to feel the survival and the texture of the protagonist's life.

The story begins with the newly unemployed father buying a used motorcycle to ferry passengers to support his family. The details of daily life are detailed and striking: the father wiping the bike each morning, bargaining over fares, and warming himself at the fire barrels with other drivers. These images capture both the bleakness of the layoff era and the small, stubborn gestures through which people held on to order. Later the narrative deepens this sense of pressure survival by showing the mother’s sudden illness, the exhausting process of surgery, and the father’s trying to borrow money. These continues to strength this endless strain and weakness.

During the story, we cannot ignore Xiao Shubin, a former cook and football enthusiast, who befriends the father. His presence feels like companionship, creative solidarity among men left behind by the system with the protagonist's father. But gradually he reveals a more troubling side: drinking too much, telling questionable or kind of dirty stories, and finally disappearing with father's motorcycle. This betrayal is expected, but what remains most vivid is the image of him waving a flag in the underpass — half-mad, half-defiant, unwilling to let go of his past pride.

The story ends not with closure but with a sigh. The father, Xiao Shubin, and even the other Sealion fans and drivers are variations of the same fate. Their lives were interrupted, never resolved, but they needed to continue. The structure of the story mirrors this lived reality. It looks like this no resolution is not a mistake but rather a deliberate narrative gesture. I guess here also matches a kind of situation of the workers who laid off at that time: no neat endings, only endurance and silence. But the good thing is, Ban Yu does not just let despair dominate the whole story. Small flashes of hope still exist — the mother’s recovery, the Sealions’ survival in the league, even the sight of Xiao Shubin’s son walking hand in hand with his girlfriend. These moments do not erase the heaviness of loss, but they testify that hope persists even in the most fragile form. It shows how individual dignity and despair are real, and that a life can still have some hope light.

Reviewed by Yue Che