The land remembers: New poetry by Laura Jane Lee and Esther Vincent Xueming

Guest review by Crispin Rodrigues

October was a stellar month for debuts with both Laura Jane Lee’s flinch & air as well as Esther Vincent’s Red Earth published. Both these collections deal with social and cultural memory: what we inherit from those who came before, and how we bear witness to the present. In this, they speak of a new generation of poets who are grappling with their literary lineages, while looking ahead to the concerns of today.

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In one of his lectures, James Joyce noted that ‘The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt’. This could not be far from the truth when reading Laura Jane Lee’s flinch & air (Out-Spoken Press, 2021), which portrays women in exile through its political and familial narratives.

The first half of the collection focuses on the lineage of women in constructing the self, a narrative too often forgotten in family trees since the experience of relocation or displacement is usually presented as a masculine adventure narrative. Here, we see the weaving of poems from the perspective of multiple women related to Lee, and their stories, and the silences around them, have shaped Lee’s experiences as the central protagonist of the collection.

SWF: WHAT I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO

It's that time of the year again — November — my birthday month and also the fantabulous Singapore Writers' Festival extravaganza (5th -14th November), where conversations, readings and provocations happen all around my favourite subject — books and writing.  Festival director Pooja Nansi and her amazing team have once again put together a programme to make a reader salivate — this year's festival promises to cover poetry, music, historical fiction, food, K-pop, Malay mysticism, scary ghosts, female desire, crime, what it takes to write wattpad fiction, in multiple languages, and all centered around the theme "Guilty Pleasures." 

With so many programmes to titillate the mind and stimulate the eyes and ears, here are some unmissable events I'm particularly looking forward to (in no particular order, but with an eye towards diversity):

Translating together, part 2.

 Nicky Harman continues the story of a co-translation project: Jia Pingwa's new novel, The Sojourn Teashop

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In my September blog, I wrote about co-translating a novel by a contemporary author, Jia Pingwa, in tandem with Jun Liu, a New Zealand-based translator who knows Jia’s work well. Since my last blog, we have been revising our translation and debating some knotty stylistic problems – and talking about the process at the Gwyl Haf Borderless Book Club, held to celebrate International Translation Day this year.

 

Jia Pingwa (1952- ) stands with Mo Yan and Yu Hua as one of the biggest names in contemporary Chinese literature. A prolific producer of novels, short stories and essays, he has a huge readership on the Chinese mainland, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Jia Pingwa's fiction focuses on the lives of common people, particularly in his home province of Shaanxi, and has hitherto been largely based in the countryside (Shaanxi Opera, forthcoming, and Broken Wings, 2019) or in the lives of workers from the countryside who have moved to the big city (Happy Dreams, 2017).

Jia’s most recent novel, The Sojourn Teashop (Sinoist, 2022) is very different: it is about a dozen women in Xijing (Jia’s fictionalised version of Xi’an, his home city) and their struggles to run their businesses, battle with bureaucracy and corruption, and find personal happiness.

In our collaboration, Jun did the first draft, I did the second draft, she commented, I commented on her comments, and we are now at the stage of going over the whole translation separately, and picking up any further problems, infelicities, or (perish the thought) mistakes.

Somewhere I belong: guest post from Sarayu Srivatsa

Sarayu Srivasta trained as an architect and city planner in Madras and Tokyo. Her first novel, The Last Pretence, was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. It was released in the UK under the title If You Look For Me, I Am Not Here. Around the time the winner of the Booker Prize is announced, the Guardian newspaper in the UK runs an annual poll of readers, Not the Booker Prize.  If You Look For Me, I Am Not Here was included on the longlist.

Sarayu’s new novel, That Was, has just been published. That Was is a coming-of-age story set in the 1990s and early 2000s amidst the ever-changing landscapes of India and Japan. One of its protagonists, Kavya, undertakes a journey of self-discovery to uncover the traumatic truth of her troubled past. That Was draws on Sarayu’s experiences of studying architecture in Japan, and of appreciating Zen philosophy, which focuses on finding joy and beauty in simplicity. It explores the idea of connections between people, places, and nature, and how Indian and Japanese cultures are intertwined.

Kavya can never truly call one place home. Here Sarayu talks about the notion of belonging, and discusses how the knowledge that both Japan and India suffer under looming memories of war and terror has influenced her writing.

So, over to Sarayu… 

Indie Spotlight: Historical Fiction - When you say ‘authentic’ . . .

Indie Spotlight is a column by WWII historical fiction author Alexa Kang. The column regularly features hot new releases and noteworthy indie-published books, and popular authors who have found success in the new creative world of independent publishing. 

As a historical fiction author, I know that readers has a high expectation of historical accuracy in our books. When we write our characters, we strive to make them as authentic as possible to the era when our stories take place. But the more I read and research history, the more I find that people in the past often behave quite differently from what we expect based on our understanding of social norms and customs of their time. Today, I invited author Melissa Addey to join us and discuss what authenticity means when we talk about historical fiction. Melissa is the author of Forbidden City, a Chinese historical fiction series about the experiences of four girls who were drafted to become concubines of the Emperor in 18th century China. 

Now, over to Melissa . . .  

The Missing Buddhas, guest post by Tony Miller

Tony Miller has just published The Missing Buddhas through Earnshaw Books (Hong Kong). Tony arrived in Hong Kong in 1972, with a degree in Modern Arabic, intending to stay three years and learn Chinese, he quickly changed his mind about leaving and spent the next 35 years serving in local government. Along the way, he developed a keen interest in Chinese painting, porcelain, jade and the conversations across borders that have influenced art and style through the ages. He is a former President of Hong Kong’s Oriental Ceramic Society and a member of the Min Chiu Society. He has published a variety of papers on previously unresearched aspects of Chinese antiquities. Since 1979, he and his wife Nga-Ching have wandered all over China, happily exploring its historic sites and natural wonders.

In the early 1900s, as chaos reigned in China, a group of life-size terracotta Buddhist monks suddenly surfaced on the antiques market and caused a sensation in the West. Sculpted vividly from life, these luohans (defenders of the Buddhist law) were completely unlike anything previously seen in Chinese art. Museums and collectors around the world competed for them, but who made them and when? And where had they been hidden before they suddenly emerged into the light?

The Missing Buddhas tells the story of these statues and unravels the question of their origins. For the past century, scholars, curators and connoisseurs have all seemed mesmerized by the German dealer, Friedrich Perzynski’s account of his search for them in inaccessible caves southwest of Beijing, where monks had allegedly hidden them from barbarian invaders. Perzynski documented his search in Jagd auf Gotter (Hunt for the Gods ). Tony takes a scalpel to Perzynski's ideas about the statues' provenance, explores a window on a fascinating period in Chinese history, and introduces an extraordinary cast of characters as he leads the reader clue by clue to the real origins of these beautiful enigmas.

So, over to Tony...

Making Sense of Memory: In conversation with Parwana Fayyaz

Editor’s note: Parwana Fayyaz’s highly-anticipated debut was released earlier this year, titled ‘Forty Names’ after a gorgeous poem (first published in PN Review) that won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2019. In this conversation with the Asian Books Blog, she unravels the many strands of tradition and translation woven into the fabric of this collection. This short interview took place over email, and has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Congratulations, once again, on the publication of Forty Names! I read all the poems in one sitting yesterday, and the most distinctive thing about these poems, to me, is the striking narrative voice that threads through them. At times, this voice seems to belong both to the child in the poems, listening to some of these stories for the first time, and to you today, re-telling them many years on. How did these poems take shape, and how long did that process take?