Books with a China theme (2017 list)
Writing a post about the books related to China I read during the year has become a tradition on this blog! I made these lists in 2015 and 2016, so 2017 couldn’t be any less!
According to Goodreads, where I register all my readings, in 2017 I read 23 books (one of them in Chinese, the rest in English and Spanish), 6 comic books (one of them in Chinese, the rest in English) and 3 novellas. I read less than last year because, as you know, I was quite busy organising two weddings and two international trips for guests. I also spent more time learning work-related things (i.e. playing videogames. Yes, I started playing videogames in my 30s, haha) and reading investment and finance related books, which are boring and take me a long time but I feel I really need to educate myself about these topics.
So, without further ado, these are the books related to China that I read this year! I also read many others not China-related, but I need to keep a topic here.
– Wild Swans, by Jung Chang
The 20th century was quite eventful in China and it deeply affected the people living here. In this book, the author tells the story of her grandmother, her mother and herself, which runs parallel to the history of China. The warlords era, the Nationalist party, the Communist liberation, the Cultural Revolution… It was published in 1991 and it quickly became a success. I love reading about Chinese history and I never get tired of personal stories from the Cultural Revolution so I liked it a lot.
– Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie
This story is also set in the Cultural Revolution, but the tone is different, lighter and comical. Two urban teenagers are sent to work in a village lost in the mountains in the west of China because their parents are “class enemies”. They manage to get on the villagers’ good side by entertaining them with stories they remember from books and movies and both of them fall in love with the prettiest girl in the area.
– Everything Under the Sky, by Matilde Asensi
In the 1920s, a Spanish woman goes to Shanghai and ends up involved in a search for the tomb of the first emperor. This author’s novels are very popular in Spain but I’m not a big fan. There were some errors in the text (right now I only remember it said Yunnan is a city, when everybody knows it is a province) and I just couldn’t like the main character. The story is entertaining, though, and it could totally be made into one of those tomb-raiders films that are so popular in China now.
– Parsley and Coriander, by Antonella Moretti
A story about several Italian women who live in China. I featured this book on my blog a few months ago.
– The Garlic Ballads, by Mo Yan
Mo Yan won the Nobel prize in Literature in 2012. This is the first of his books that I read and, to be honest, I found it surprising he is still living in China and free! In this story, the Communist officials are definitely not the good guys. It’s about a rural area where all the peasants plant garlic because the government promises to buy the full harvest. When the moment comes, the officials realise there is too much garlic and won’t buy it as promised (planning is an activity that very few people in China seem to be able to do successfully). Obviously, the peasants are not going to be too happy about this. The structure of the book is a bit strange and at first I found it very frustrating and confusing, but in the end I liked it a lot.
– Send you a horse, by San Mao
The original title is 送你一匹马, I don’t think it has been officially translated into English. Sanmao is probably Taiwan’s most famous writer and a few years ago I loved her Sahara Stories (she lived in Western Sahara when it was still a Spanish colony; she was married to a Spanish man), which I also read in Chinese. However, I bought this book without being able to peek inside as it was plastic wrapped and turns out it is a collection of articles, which I’m not a big fan of. It is useful to get to know the author herself, whom, based on those articles, seemed to me like a lonely and depressed woman.
– Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, by Yu Hua
Yu Hua is a very successful and famous writer in China and I had never read anything from him before. With this title, I was expecting a very sad and dramatic story, but nothing further from reality: I laughed a lot! It’s not that the story is comical per se (a man is forced to sell his blood to supplement his income) but the characters, the situations, the dialogues, are mostly very funny, with a very brutal and direct Chinese sense of humour. I read it in the Spanish translation, which was done by a famous professor from Barcelona University and was indeed very good.
– Brothers, by Yu Hua
I liked Chronicle of a Blood Merchant so much that I quickly started another of Yu Hua’s novels. This one was very popular when I just arrived to China and a teacher suggested we read the Chinese version, but it is quite long and I never dared (I read very, very slow in Chinese). I laughed a lot again but I am not sure I would openly recommend it, especially to sensitive Americans: there is an inordinate amount of pages dedicated to discuss bums and hymens, the main character is a sexist prick and most women in the story are slutty gold diggers. The plot is about two brothers (by their parents’ marriage, not by blood), one of them is an honest, good man and the other… will find success in Chinese society.
– Peking Story, by David Kidd
David Kidd married a woman from a Chinese aristocratic family and lived in Beijing at the end of the 1940s. Most accounts of this period that I’ve read before were from the rural side, so it was very interesting to hear about the Communist liberation from the point of view of a traditional, urban rich family.
– Expat Jimmy, by Travis Lee
A novella about the first day of an English teacher in China. I featured this book on my blog a few months ago.
– Scars, by Li Kunwu
A quite weird comic book about how the author found a lot of Japanese pictures from the Sino-Japanese war in an antique shop and the research he did about them.
– Pearl of China, by Anchee Min
A novel about Pearl S. Buck’s life in China, as seen by a Chinese friend of hers. It is an easy read and some parts are facts, but others are fiction. After reading it I got several of Pearl S. Buck’s books, but I will read them next year. I did read The Good Earth last year.
What did you read this year? Any recommendations for my ever growing China-related book list?
The one about the Cultural Revolution sounds very interesting. When I hear the personal stories coming out of that era, I’ve always wondered if they were true of not. Then again personal stories are personal and individual (a lot of stories I’ve heard are about torment and torture), so each one might most certainly be true. Haha, playing video games for work. It must be so fun :D
I think all of them are basically true, but in some cases as in “Life and Death in Shanghai”, I think the author added some details because it is impossible she could remember detailed conversations decades later. There’s also the thing that most of these stories were written by people who had horrible experiences and ended up leaving China, but the ones whose lives were not influenced that much by the Cultural Revolution didn’t really publish their version of the story.
Nice post. Very interesting. I know a few ones, by now I’m reading “Wild Sawns”.. If you want you have “Olhos de Chinesa” from Eugenia Dobroes when she lived there…
Thanks for the recommendation! Was it translated to English or Spanish? I don’t know if my Portuguese is good enough to read books xD
Creo que para ya solo en portugues. Pero es un livro muy facil de leer, asi que no tendras muchos problemas leiendo…
More great books from you Marta; some I have read – I think I read Wild Swans about twenty years ago (or whenever it came out) great book!!
Thanks, Sue! What was your favourite book this year?
Well I have read ‘the barefoot lawyer’. Blind Chinese lawyer home detained in China then escaped to USA. Sad but great. And I have just read two very funny fiction books by a Chinese fellow calked Kevin Kwan. He writes stories of the filthy rich Chinese in Singapore and HK. If you Google then you can see them. They are ridiculous and still funny. There is one more book out and the first book is being made into a movie. I think you would enjoy them just because you know the Chinese. Trashy but an easy read. I also read Malia’s (think that is her name) autobiography. The young girl from Pakistan who the Taliban shot in the head for promoting that girls should be schooled. What a wonderful young girl.
I haven’t read any of these! Thanks for the recommendations…or warnings. ;)
So you’re warning Americans off of certain books because of an emphasis on hymens? Probably a good call. We’re pretty prudish, thanks to a) the Puritans, and b) Europe exporting all their religious crazies to America.
While I was reading Brothers I was indeed wondering what a regular American reader would think of it, hahaha. I find very interesting that what is supposedly the most advanced and free country in the world still is so very influenced by religion. Do presidents still swear on bibles and stuff? And what’s with body parts being so offensive? Children will not be traumatised just by seeing a boob!
Ha, I felt exactly the same way about the protagonist of “Brothers”. I found the first part a lot better, when it concentrated on the parents. Still an interesting read though and it helped me understand a lot of the changes going on in China in the 20th c.
For more China-related fiction I would recommend Read Paper Republic: https://paper-republic.org/pubs/read/ They are a group of translators and publish free short stories in English translation to get publishers interested in Chinese literature. A good place to start if you want to check out an author.
Oh, and articles or essays are usually called 散文 (at least in Taiwan), so you can look out for that on the book cover.
There wasn’t any information on the cover or on the back! Nothing at all! Next time I should just do my homework and research online before buying…
Thanks for the link! What an interesting initiative!
2017 was the first year I did one of those book lists, in which, I wrote down in my journal the title of the book I finished so that I could see how much I read. But I didn’t write down books that I started, but didn’t finish which was sort of annoying because some books I invested in but couldn’t be bothered to read it all the way through.
Anyway.
You’re very good to read so many books about China! And your book lists will be references to come. I, too, am interested in the Cultural Revolution period because that’s when my family fled China.
Happy New Year Marta!
I never leave books in the middle! If I start them, I have to finish them even if it kills me, haha.
Ah, you’re one of those types ;)
Brothers was a good read but the moral is sad. I hated the bad brother, the one who succeeded. I need to read a Mo Yan book and this one sounds intriguing. I’ve heard about Expat Jimmy and that sounds interesting too.
I also read Garlic Ballads last year, as a preparation for coming to China (at least that was my excuse why I read instead of finishing my Master’s thesis). I also wondered about political implications, because of how officials are depicted in the novel. And then I talked with some of my Chinese students about Mo Yan (whom they admired deeply) and it turned out they had never heard about this particular book. We searched Baidu after that and apparently it is censored in China.
My highlight among the books about China that I read last year was Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeline Thien.
I found it in Chinese on Amazon (although only one result, published in 2017 and inside a collection with all of Mo Yan’s novels) so maybe the banning has been lifted now. But it was published in 1988 so unbanning it now probably won’t be making people aware of it…
That name sounds familiar, it won or was nominated to some prize last year, right? I’ll try to get my hands on it. Thanks for the recommendation!
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