The work of award-winning Chinese writer Xue Yiwei is now available to a global audience for the first time. The Peddler. The Physics Teacher. The Dramatist. As we read each of these nine loosely connected short stories, we are introduced to a cast of characters that have moved to Shenzhen, China’s newest metropolis. A small fishing village three decades ago, it is now a city with a population over 15 million.
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What: Shenzheners (Linda Leith Publishing, 2016)Who: Based in Montreal, Xue Yiwei is one of the most influential Chinese authors writing today. He has a BSc in Computer Science, an MA in English Literature, and a PhD in Linguistics. He is the author of twenty books, including five novels, six collections of stories, and five collections of literary essays. Shenzheners is his first work translated into English.Why you need to read this now: These are stories that connect us with lives we can only imagine.The Peddler. The Physics Teacher. The Dramatist. As we read each of these nine loosely connected short stories, we are introduced to a cast of characters that have moved to Shenzhen, China’s newest metropolis. A small fishing village three decades ago, it is now a city with a population over 15 million.As a young boy during the Cultural Revolution, Xue Yiwei initially acquired books through an “underground channel”. After moving to Shenzhen as a young man he then found it was not difficult to smuggle books and periodicals from neighbouring Hong Kong. He belongs to a generation of Chinese writers profoundly influenced by Western writing, and in his case, particularly by existentialism and modernist literature.Dedicated to James Joyce, Shenzheners is a deceptively quiet ramble through Shenzhen, this Chinese experiment in urbanization. As we meet each of his characters, we are also introduced to the importance of literature, language and reading, and the part these play in their lives. Kundera. Proust. Yeats. Shakespeare. Beckett.Waiting and the absurdity of life. The hidden dreams, missed opportunities and false hopes inherent in the tensions between ambition, day-to-day life, and the place of love in the modern world.In Xue Yiwei’s opening story called “The Country Girl,” the main character is a Canadian translator who believes every language is a “capacious prospect,” and like the country girl’s view of language, Shenzheners is in many ways also “a capacious prospect.” The rhythm of each story, the loose interconnectivity of the stories within the collection, and Xue Yiwei’s attention to small details while maintaining the wide-focus lens upon each of his subjects, creates a deceptively spacious reading experience in which readers can both immerse themselves in the riches of his storytelling while stepping back and observing the scenes laid before them.Xue Yiwei brings us into the hearts and minds of just a few people in Shenzhen, and through the alchemy of literature and reading, into the hearts and minds of the people we see all around us in our own lives.The work of award-winning Chinese writer Xue Yiwei is now available to a global audience for the first time. The Country Girl meets an Asian man on a train and they discover they are reading the same book, The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, she in English and he in Chinese. A discussion of the very nature of translation follows, and they begin to open up to each other as they speed from Toronto towards Montreal.It seems somehow appropriate that this Montreal publisher who has a reputation for promoting literary translation chose to publish Shenzheners. Well-versed in the intricacies of language and the art of translation, they are perfectly situated to explore one of the questions asked by the Asian man when he meets the Canadian country girl on the train —“Can a translation ever be faithful?”This intelligent and at times heart-wrenching book explores this and so much more, as it asks some of our most existential questions.X plus Y: Dedicated to “the Irishman who inspires” him, Xue Yiwei’s Shenzheners resonates with the solitude and isolation of James Joyce’s Dubliners, while echoing the peripatetic rhythms and themes of uncertainty, anguish and running away, found in one of Xue Yiwei’s favourite films, Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas.* * *Thank you to Linda Leith Publishing, especially to Carolyn, for sharing this wonderful writer with us for the first time in English. If you love discovering new authors, check out our previous First Fiction Friday picks.
