China Portfolio

Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature I

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By Li Zhuang, Cynthia Chen, Chen Du, Xisheng Chen, and Jolie Zhilei Zhou

Table of Contents:

  • Li Zhuang, “Fan Fiction”
  • Cynthia Chen, “When the TOEFL robot asked us to ‘Describe the city you live in,’ the whole room started repeating that question as if casting an aimless spell”
  • Yan An, translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen, “Photo of Free Life in the E-Era”
  • Jolie Zhilei Zhou, “Der Knall” 
Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature I
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Paper Summer

By YUNHAN FANG

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

 

By the summer of 2009, I found I was thinking less and less about the Wenchuan earthquake the year prior, in which 87,000 people had died, my father among them. That year, on the day of Xiazhi, I met a girl called Thirteen. We spent the night together, having sex and talking until the sky turned the color of moonstone.

Paper Summer
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My Five-Thousand-Meter Years

BY K-YU LIU

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

 

The rumor was there was a backdoor into the best running camp in the capital. To get your kid in, there’d better be something wrong with their mind.

Mother drove me to the facility with a note from Dr. Chen in her purse. For four hours, roads splintered and strayed under our wheels. Eventually we arrived at the far Northeast corner: cornfields and silent cranes, tired grey apartments, willow trees bowing their listless branches.

My Five-Thousand-Meter Years
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The American Scholar

By JIANAN QIAN

This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.

 

Alex dislikes the security check in Shanghai’s subway stations, from both an ideological and personal perspective. Being American, he hates any intrusion on privacy. And today he’s carrying a black dildo in his backpack, wrapped in a wine tote bag with a Spanish brand name on the outside. Still, he worries the X-ray man might stop him for inspection.

He touches the student ID in his jeans pocket. Back in college, George—his Chinese teacher whose toupee once came loose—had told him that the Chinese respect Ph.D. students.

The man lets him pass.

“Xie xie,” Alex thanks him.

It’s not rush hour. He finds a seat and places his backpack on his lap. With his uncombable hair sprawling out in all directions, he looks like the photo of Einstein that appears in Chinese high school textbooks. Not that Alex would know about that. His destination is the west side of the city, a five-star hotel. A sex class will take place in one of the suites and he’ll be one of the models. It’s his first time participating in the sex industry, and the thought brings a smile to his face. However, the young woman sitting beside him seems uncomfortable or offended by his presence, and moves to another seat.

The American Scholar
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Memories of the Rise and Fall of VICE China, 2015-2022

By RUONAN ZHENG

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.


1. May 2021

At an assignment in Xinjiang, I am covering a rising female photographer, club-hopping with her and her boyfriend. Amidst glittering disco balls, fast drum beats, and fake US dollars tossed around by a random rapper, I am introduced to a guy who used to work for Vice China, making short documentaries. His exact greeting was: “Send my best regards to the bosses; I too graduated from there.” We exchanged our WeChats, and he pulled off some crazy dance moves on the floor afterward. I didn’t hear from him again but have enjoyed the hikes and mountain scenery posted on his WeChat Moments ever since.

“Graduated” is a word many ex-employees of Vice China use to describe their experience after leaving the company. Our time there felt as if we were a bunch of undergrads taking wacky tequila shots in the office, then still coming in hungover the next morning because there was nowhere better to go. Near the end of Vice China’s existence, Simon, one of the OGs who had worked for them since the beginning, reminisced about an end-of-the-year company cruise party, recalling those times as a dream. Back then, he did a little bit of everything—editorial, commercial, social media. There was always stuff to do, partnerships to form, and, of course, money from advertisers to spend. All the alcohol we ingested and the battles we fought with clients were preparing us for life after, in the cruel outside world.

The allure of working at Vice was very real for a twenty-something, especially for a Chinese kid. The Western influence took root and prospered at Vice China, which opposed everything a normal job in China entailed. To be recruited meant becoming part of a cool-kid club, access to a social currency, a guaranteed adventurous time.

Memories of the Rise and Fall of VICE China, 2015-2022
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Against This Earth, We Knock

This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.
 

By JINJIN XU

 

              I try to feel this is home 1

                                         I don’t think

                                I am a foreigner 2
                                             I was not supposed to be      living 3

Against This Earth, We Knock
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Burning Language: New And Queer Chinese Voices

Editor’s Note

For the rest of the world, China’s 2008 Summer Olympics—with its $40 billion budget, dramatic “Bird’s Nest” stadium, and the lavish spectacle of its opening ceremony—marked the ascension of a new economic superpower onto the modern stage. Since then, new generations of Chinese youth have grown up into a society constantly rippling with changes, inundated with globalization, technology, and consumerism.

Bird's nest stadium from Beijing Olympics 2008

Beijing, China – The national stadium built for the 2008 Summer Olympics & Paralympics

Today, the West views China with curiosity, suspicion, and a sense of enigma and threat. Chinese literature translated into English is still predominantly written by older authors from the period of World War II, Maoism, and the Cultural Revolution. This leaves the up-and-coming generation of Chinese artists, now dealing with wholly different lifestyles and a wholly new set of concerns, all too often neglected.

In proposing this special folio to The Common, I wanted to showcase perspectives from this younger generation, bringing the breadth and dynamism of their subject matter, style, and voice to an English-reading audience. I also wanted to combat the blind spot in publishing queer voices from China, and several of the pieces selected are from writers writing either explicitly or implicitly from a lens of non-heterosexuality—which is sometimes comparable to Western norms of LGBTQ+ identity and sometimes not.

In the poems, stories, and translations in this folio, we find writing which is interested in the stretchiness and flexibility of language across cultures and tongues. In experimental and hybrid pieces such as The CAO Collective’s “qiào bā ,” Jolie Zhilei Zhou’s “Der Knall,” or Cynthia Chen’s “When the TOEFL robot asked us…,” diasporic poets who have immigrated abroad use imagination and irreverence to push the boundaries of English, which is their second or even third language, resulting in pieces which are delightfully fresh and defamiliarized.

The stories and lyric pieces reveal a generation restless for art, creation, and newness, but mired down also with a deep sense of generational anxiety, pressure, lack of direction, and identity confusion, as in Ruonan Zheng’s essay on her time reporting on the Chinese underground for Vice China, Yun Qin Wang’s poem “the first rain,” Yunhan Fang’s story of a romance between two women in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, and K-Yu Liu’s story of a dormitory of mentally ill teen girls sent to train at a competitive running facility.

Some of the pieces also deal with the disorientation caused by the super-rapid development of technology and communications, such as Yan An’s cheeky poem “Photo of Free Life in the E-Era.” Meanwhile, Jianan Qian’s short story “The American Scholar” cleverly turns the Western gaze on the “Eastern Other” back on its head by inhabiting the perspective of an American scholar who is shocked by the sex and kink scene in China.

Finally, traditional Chinese artifacts are reinvented and made modern with Shangyang Fang’s translations of Song Dynasty Ci poetry, which experiments, breaks from, and rewrites lines by poets written over a thousand years ago. Li Zhuang molds a story of China’s first and only female emperor, Wu Zetian, into a poetic lesbian fanfiction. And visual artist and writer JinJin Xu showcases an installation and collective poem taken from her research into nüshu (lit: “women’s script”), a writing system only for women denied access to education which has existed for centuries.

I selected the pieces for this folio hoping to break apart some of the preconceived notions Western readers may bring to their view on China. The writers collected here showcase the scrappiness and energy of a younger generation clamoring to be heard. I hope that you enjoy these poems and stories, which are unexpected, sharp, sometimes uncomfortable, and very often tender; above all, they powerfully evoke the restlessness, dreaminess, quickness, and intensity of youth.

—Cleo Qian, guest editor

 


 

This portfolio was edited by Cleo Qian. Cleo Qian is a queer writer and poet who is the author of the award-winning short story collection LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO (Tin House, 2023). She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow and a 2025 Notre Dame Storozynski Writing Fellow.

 

Contents

Fiction
Paper Summer” by Yunhan Fang
My Five-Thousand-Meter Years” by K-Yu Liu
The American Scholar” by Jianan Qian

Poetry Feature I
“Fan Fiction” by Li Zhuang
“When the TOEFL robot asked us to ‘Describe the city you live in,’ the whole room started repeating that question as if casting an aimless spell” by Cynthia Chen
“Photo of Free Life in the E-Era” by Yan An, translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen
“Der Knall” by Jolie Zhilei Zhou

Poetry Feature II
“Departure” & “Visiting Lingyan Mountain” by Wu Wenying, translated by Shangyang Fang
“Return to Lin Gao at Night” by Su Shi, translated by Shangyang Fang
“the first rain” by Yun Qin Wang
“qiào bā: Community Poetry in Translation” by The CAO Collective

Nonfiction
Memories of the Rise and Fall of Vice China, 2015-2022” by Ruonan Zheng 

Art
Against This Earth, We Knock by JinJin Xu

 

Burning Language: New And Queer Chinese Voices
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Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature II

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By WU WENYING, SU SHI, SHANGYANG FANG, YUN QIN WANG, and CAO COLLECTIVE

Translated poems appear in both the original Chinese and in English.

Table of Contents:

  • Wu Wenying, translated by Shangyang Fang, “Departure” & “Visiting Lingyan Mountain” 
  • Su Shi, translated by Shangyang Fang, “Return to Lin Gao at Night”
  • Yun Qin Wang, “The First Rain”
  • CAO Collective, “qiào bā”
Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature II
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