Lion City Lit: Audrey Chin

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore.  Lion City Lit explores literary life in our own backyard.  This week Singaporean author Audrey Chin is in conversation with Raelee Chapman.

As both a child of migrant Chinese and settled Peranakan parents, and also as a daughter-in-law of the Vietnamese diaspora, Audrey sees herself as an in-between person, a traveller through different cultures. She writes what she knows, telling stories about the search for belonging, about South East Asia, about her mixed cultural inheritance, and about the Westerners who colonised her region. Her most recent novel, As the Heart Bones Break, spans 60 years, and follows an Orange County Viet-Cong spy's quest to find peace and a home for his conflicted heart. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English language fiction

What was your inspiration for As The Heart Bones Break? How much research was required for the novel and how long did it take to write?

I married into the Vietnamese diaspora over 30 years ago. In part, As The Heart Bones Break was written to address the fence of silence which my Vietnamese family and friends erected around their memories; I wanted to leave my children with a story of this history. But it was also written as a response to the dearth of Vietnam War fiction from the point of view of male Vietnamese participants, especially the majority who had loyalty to neither North nor South but merely wanted the war to be over.

This Week In The Asian Review Of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site.  If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books.  Here is a list of its newest reviews:

Scenes from the Enlightenment: A Novel of Manners by Kim Namcheon, translated by Charles La Shure reviewed by John Butler
The Blind Lady’s Descendants by Anees Salim reviewed by Divya Dubey
Chinese Rules: Mao’s Dog, Deng’s Cat, and Five Timeless Lessons from the Front Lines in China by Tim Clissold reviewed by Peter Gordon
Penguin China World War One specials round-up of reviews by various reviewers.

New & Notable

Chinese Rules:  Mao’s Dog, Deng’s Cat and Five Timeless Lessons from the Front Lines in China 

By Tim Clissold

This new book, from the author of the international bestseller Mr China, explains how to do business in China – and win.

Part adventure story, part history lesson, part business book, Chinese Rules chronicles Tim Clissold’s most recent exploits of doing business in China and explains the secrets behind navigating China’s cultural and political maze.

Tim tells the story of how he built a carbon credit business in China, found himself caught between the world’s largest carbon emitter and the world’s richest man, and saved one of the biggest deals in carbon credits on behalf of a London investment firm. Backed by The Gates Foundation, he then set up a new company with Mina, his trusted lead negotiator from the first deal, but of course, not all goes to plan when you are playing by Chinese rules…

Tim intersperses his own personal story with business insights and key episodes in China’s long political and military history to uncover the five rules that anyone can use when doing business in modern China. Together, these five rules explain how to compete with China on its own terms. Rich in entertaining anecdotes, surreal scenes of cultural confusion and myth-busting insights Chinese Rules is a perfect jumping off point for anyone interested in contemporary China.

I Ching

Translated with an introduction and commentary by John Minford

With our lives changing at dizzying speed, the I Ching, or Book of Change, is increasingly consulted, in both China and the West, for answers to fundamental questions about the world and our place in it. The world's oldest extant book of divination, it dates back 3,000 years to ancient shamanistic practices involving the ritual preparation of the shoulder bones of oxen, to enable communication with the other world. A tool for the attainment of a heightened level of consciousness, it has recently been an influence on such Western cultural icons as Bob Dylan, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Philip K. Dick and Philip Pullman. Today millions around the world turn to the I Ching for insights on spiritual growth, business, medicine, genetics, game theory, strategic thinking, and leadership.

This new translation, by distinguished scholar and translator John Minford, is the result of over a decade of sustained work and a lifetime of immersion in Chinese thought. Through his introduction and commentary, Minford explores many dimensions of the I Ching, not only capturing the majesty and mystery of this legendary work, but also giving us various ways to approach it and make it our own.  With its origins in prophecy and divination, the I Ching is a system of belief, refined over thousands of years. In both East and West, more and more people are now reaching for it to find some stability in our times of uncertainty and rapid change. Informed by the latest archaeological discoveries, this translation offers the reader a potent encounter with an ancient way of seeing and experiencing the world, and an illuminating trip on the path to self-knowledge.

John Minford has translated numerous works from Chinese, including The Art of War, Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, and the last two volumes of Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century novel The Story of the Stone. He has taught in China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Australia. He is a professor of Chinese at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.

Published by Viking, in hardback priced in local currencies. 

Also of note: the October publication, by Penguin, of The Analects of Confucius in an all-new translation by Yale historian Annping Chin. Paperback, priced in local currencies. 

Lion City Lit: Q & A with R Ramachandran

Following on from the success of Singapore Writers Festival, we realised here at Asian Books Blog that we ought to give greater coverage to what's going on in our own backyard. The result is Lion City Lit, our new Singapore slot.  Here, Rosie Milne talks to R Ramachandran, executive director, National Book Development Council of Singapore.

Singapore aims to position itself as a centre for publishing of Asian content - it wants any writer with content relating to Asia to think of it as the place to publish. It helps that the country has four official languages: English; Chinese; Malay; Tamil. The vibrant local publishing scene is unusual in that it has houses specialising in each language. As part of its strategy to win pre-eminence in the region, the National Book Development Council makes a number of awards through the Singapore Literature Prize, which has categories in each language sector.  The 2014 awards were announced last week. I asked  Mr. Ramachandran about the tiny City-State’s big ambitions.

How does the Singapore Literature Prize contribute to raising Singapore's profile as a centre of publishing? 

Books can be eligible even if they are not published in Singapore, and the award system is geared to grow both to include books published throughout Asia, and also to include a larger number of categories and languages than at present.

Other than administering the Singapore Literature Prize, what else is the National Book Development Council doing to promote publishing in Singapore?

In order to serve as an effective centre of Asian content, we need to develop our translation resources so that Asian content in other languages can be translated into English and published in Singapore. Such translated works could be more easily marketed in the region and beyond than could books in Asian languages.  We are planning to set up a translation centre to facilitate translation of literary works into different languages.  We have also upgraded our established training body, the Academy of Literary Arts and Publishing, to develop the skills of those in the local publishing industry. 

Doesn’t the City-State’s small size and small books market limit its ambitions?

No. We publish for the world. For instance, each year we organise the Asian Festival of Children’s Content. This brings together content creators and producers, publishers, teachers, librarians and anyone interested in quality Asian content for children. The Festival carries the slogan: Asian Content for the World’s Children.  But it’s not just children’s publishing, we want all our local publishers to publish beyond the region to the world market, as do publishing houses in the US and the UK.

Have you learned from other small countries, which have had a big literary impact?  I'm thinking of Ireland.

We have not only studied Ireland, but also Israel and New Zealand, countries whose writers and creative people have made an impact on the rest of the world. The great advantage these countries have over us is a longer tradition of literature and a culture of publishing. Singapore is a migrant state, and a relatively new one, and even though our fathers and forefathers came from nations with rich cultural traditions – China, India, the Malay world - they migrated for materially better lives. Singapore’s early years were essentially spent on day-to-day matters and economic concerns were predominant. Since independence, after 50 years of post-colonial development, cultural interests have come to the fore. The growth of libraries, museums, art galleries, performing art centres, and a host of other services have emphasised the importance of the arts.

Okay, but are Singapore’s publishing ambitions driven by commerce, or culture?

Singapore has always been a commercial city and it will continue to be. But great commercial cities also emerge as centres of culture. Take London and New York in the present day, and Alexandria and Venice in earlier times. All are great examples of cities that are or were centres of the arts made possible by their commercial wealth. While commerce and banking are the foundations of wealth in Singapore, it has also realised the important part culture plays in people’s lives and is committed to nurture Singapore as a global city of the arts. The government has spent billions developing arts infrastructure, for example setting up the National Arts Council, the Media Development Authority, the School of the Arts, LaSalle College of the Arts, and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, to train, nurture and support creative talent.

An international publishing industry needs an international rights marketplace. Are there any plans for Singapore to develop a books fair and rights market?  

Yes, the Singapore Book Publishers Association is planning to set up such a fair. The Book Council hopes to be involved in this effort. Meanwhile, the Book Council has developed a marketplace for children’s contents called Media Mart as part of the Asian Festival of Children’s Content. We want Media Mart to become known as the foremost regional rights fair for children’s content.

This Week In The Asian Review Of Books / Murakami Wins Welt Literature Prize

Asian Books Blog is not a review site.  If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books.  Here is a list of its newest reviews:

City of Darkness Revisited by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot reviewed by Mark L. Clifford
From the Tsar’s Railway to the Red Army: The Experience of Chinese Labourers in Russia during the First World War and Bolshevik Revolution by Mark O’Neill reviewed by Juan José Morales
Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu by Beverley Foulks McGuire reviewed by John Butler
The Battle of Penang: World War One in the Far East by JR Robertson reviewed by Tim O'Connell

Also, over in Germany Haruki Murakami has been awarded the Welt Literature Prize.  Click here for coverage in the Japan Times.

Gentlemen, Samurai, and Germans in China / guest post by Oleg Benesch

Oxford University Press has recently published Inventing the Way of The Samurai, by Oleg Benesch. The book offers a re-evaluation of some of the longest-standing myths about Japanese thought and culture. Oleg Benesch here further explains…

One hundred years ago today, far from the erupting battlefields of Europe, a small German force in the city of Tsingtau (Qingdao), Germany’s most important possession in China, was preparing for an impending siege. The small fishing village of Qingdao and the surrounding area had been reluctantly leased to the German Empire by the Chinese government for 99 years in 1898, and German colonists soon set about transforming this minor outpost into a vibrant city boasting many of the comforts of home, including the forerunner of the now-famous Tsingtao Brewery. By 1914, Qingdao had over 50,000 residents and was the primary trading port in the region. Given its further role as the base for the Far East Fleet of the Imperial German Navy, however, Qingdao was unable to avoid becoming caught up in the faraway European war.

The forces that besieged Qingdao in the autumn of 1914 were composed of troops from Britain and Japan, the latter entering the war against Germany in accord with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The Alliance had been agreed in 1902 amid growing anxiety in Britain regarding its interests in East Asia, and rapidly modernizing Japan was seen as a useful ally in the region. For Japanese leaders, the signing of such an agreement with the most powerful empire of the day was seen as a major diplomatic accomplishment and an acknowledgement of Japan’s arrival as one of the world’s great powers. More immediately, the Alliance effectively guaranteed the neutrality of third parties in Japan’s looming war with Russia, and Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 sent shockwaves across the globe as the first defeat of a great European empire by a non-Western country in a conventional modern war.

Singapore Writers Festival: New Books from Ethos

On the last day here at Singapore Writers Festival local publishing house Ethos launched two new poetry titles - with a twist.  Each anthology was produced entirely by Singapore's next generation of poets, fresh new voices from the creative writing programmes at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and The National University of Singapore (NUS).

NUS students offered Red Pulse 11: poetry to a local beat, edited by Kevin Lam and Tan Xian Yeow. Thanks to Singapore's minuscule size on the world map, its inhabitants often refer to it, affectionately, as The Little Red Dot. Kevin and Xian Yeow explained that their title turns the dot into a pulse, to reflect Singapore's dynamism, the furious pace of life here, and the constant movement.

You can't get much faster than an F1 race. Kevin presented his wonderfully zooming poem The Singapore Grand Prix - presented, not read, because this is a poem that has escaped text, and gone roaring off into the digital world.  You can experience its multimedia energy by clicking here and scrolling down 

Xiang Yeow read Definition of Long-Kang noun. A long-kang is a monsoon drain, and in the poem a man recalls the pleasure he derived, as a boy, from catching guppies in a long-kang, and his disappointment when his mother rebuffed his gift of those guppies by warning him long-kangs are dangerous.  In the present, he is disturbed to find the long-kang has been cemented over. 

NTU students offered Kepulauan, edited by Zhang Jieqiang, Hidhir Razak and Marcus Tan Yi-hern. Hidhir explained that pulau is Malay for island, whilst kepulauan is Malay for archipelago, their title thus plays with ideas about insularity and isolation, as well as making a geographical reference to the once Malay, now Indonesian, archipelago.

On Tuesday the Singapore Literature Prize for English language poetry was awarded jointly to two men,  Joshua Ip and Yong Shu Hoong, much to the disgust of Grace Chia, who was a contender for her collection Cordelia - click here for full details. Consequently, accusations of gender bias in the local poetry scene have been flying about all week.  At this evening's launch, the moderator, Ng Kah Gay, from Ethos books, alluded to the controversy when he challenged all the editors to explain why neither anthology had a single female editor. Hidhir and Xian Yeow each denied there was anything sinister going on. Hidhir said Kepulauan had initially had some women editors, but they had dropped out for various reasons. Xiang Yeow said Red Pulse 11 had plenty of female input from NUS staff.

Given this background, it was great to hear young women poets taking to the mic with confidence. Debra Khng, a contributor to Red Pulse 11, sang a poem about Robert Frost, to the accompaniment of a guitar. Shane Lim Han Jung, a contributor to Kepulauan, read a spiky challenge to unthinking acceptance of the strategies of nation building - a live subject of discussion in Singapore, which won independence only 50 years ago. The Merlion, a mixed creature, half lion, half fish, dreamed up by a marketing man, was for many years used by the Singapore Tourist Board as logo. Shane Lim Han Jung's poem Merlion addressed ideas about Singaporean identity, and explored the extent to which manufactured myths are believed.

At the close of the evening Ng Kah Gay commented that anybody wanting to get both anthologies signed by all the authors would have a long time to wait.  Likewise, it is difficult to mention all the contributors in a single blog post. But Red Pulse 11, and Kepulauan show the future of poetry in Singapore is, as they say, as bright as the tropical sun!