All posts tagged: China

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.

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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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Call for Submissions: A Special Folio on China after 2008

The Common, in collaboration with guest editor Cleo Qian, will publish a special online folio of work about youth and contemporary culture from writers with a strong tie to Mainland China. Submissions will open on February 1st. 

Call for submissions graphic with same information as is on the web page
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 come of age into a society constantly rippling with changes, inundated with globalization, technology, and consumerism. The West continues to view China with curiosity, suspicion, and a sense of enigma as the country rapidly industrialized and urbanized, and its economic and political influence continues to shift. Yet Chinese literature translated into English is still predominantly written by older authors from the period of WW2, Maoism, and the Cultural Revolution, while neglecting the up-and-coming generation of Chinese artists, now dealing with wholly different lifestyles and sets of concerns.

Call for Submissions: A Special Folio on China after 2008
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Shenyang: In Search of Reverse Donkeys

By TONY HAO

An apartment complex in Shenyang, Dongbei (China). A man rides a bike full of cardboard boxes in the foreground. Parked cars line the streets.

Shenyang, Dongbei

I wore a cream-white scarf and sat on a plastic stool… Behind me were residential buildings, NE Pharm’s apartments, windows caged behind iron lattices. From a distance, the buildings looked like a prison. Wilted leeks and cabbages were piled neatly on the windowsills: old people definitely lived there. Those cargo three-wheelers we call ‘reverse donkeys’ were chained to the rails in front of the buildings. I sat in the sun in front of the wall, my face hurting from the cold wind.

– from “Free and Easy Wandering,” by Dongbei writer Ban Yu. Translated from Chinese by me.

 

Literature was my introduction to Dongbei, or Northeastern China, and its capital city Shenyang. I stumbled upon its ongoing literary movement “The Dongbei Renaissance” in 2020, when I was stranded at home during the pandemic. Before then, I’d known Dongbei as Father’s birthplace and China’s industrial center. After reading my first Dongbei book, I found myself shaken by Dongbeis history and the collective trauma of its economic collapse. Since the 1990s, China’s capitalist reform has obliterated the livelihood of millions of state-employed workers. The proletariats who built their country suddenly found themselves kicked out of their factories into a new identity: penniless unskilled social outcasts. They never imagined being abandoned by their government, which, proclaiming communism, promised every worker prosperity.

Father left Dongbei in 1973 when the state moved Grandpa’s work to Beijing, the metropolis I was born in. I couldn’t imagine what my life course would’ve been had Grandpa remained up north. As an aspiring writer and literary translator, I felt the urge to bring Dongbei to a wider audience. In the summer of 2021, after translating Ban’s 42-page story, I traveled to Shenyang for a literary pilgrimage.

My 38-year veteran cab driver Mr. Wu introduced himself by showcasing his knowledge of Shenyang’s narrowest streets without needing a map. As we drove along Qingnian Dajie, the ten-lane boulevard connecting the airport to downtown, the landscape of boundless poplar trees and crop fields was slowly replaced by newly constructed residential compounds. Mr. Wu pointed out to me the luxury apartment of Zhao Benshan, Dongbei’s most iconic comedian. I told Mr. Wu that I was an English and journalism student interested in Dongbei literature. Mr. Wu told me what the pre-collapse 1980s was like and which cultural landmarks I should visit. I asked him how I could see the old Shenyang portrayed in literature. “You won’t be able to find the old Shenyang anymore,” he said, “the time has completely changed.”

An intense feeling of unfairness gnawed at my heart as Mr. Wu drove me by the glamorous apartment buildings. They erased the city’s impoverished past but in no way offered an extravagant present available to everyone. I decided that even if I couldn’t find Shenyang’s past, at least I’d like to see a reverse donkey.

Reverse donkeys are tricycles unique to Dongbei. Unlike normal tricycles with the passenger’s seat in the front, reverse donkeys have the rider seated above one back wheel and a large freight container installed above two front wheels. Reverse donkeys are usually associated with high-intensity, low-skilled labor. Middle-aged riders squeeze their way through the narrowest lanes in old neighborhoods, hauling cargo loads taller than themselves, making only about ten dollars per ride.

The next morning, I rode a bike through the old industrial Tiexi District, where “Free and Easy Wandering” is set; the names of many roads there still contain the character for ‘workers’ (Gong, ). On the west side of the eight-laned “Protecting-the-Workers North Street” (工北街Wei Gong Bei Jie), concrete apartment buildings soared into the clouds, waiting for windows to be installed. In front of the apartment buildings under construction, a blue metal framework proudly displayed the names of a real estate company, a construction company, and the effusive yet literary name of the future neighborhood: “The Majestic/Honorable Passage-of-Time” (Yu Shiguang). In front of the construction site, herds of Toyotas and Nissans passed, shepherded by occasional Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs.

But only two extra blocks beyond, the streets were taken over by bikes and box vans. The pedestrian pavements were soaked in barbeque-scented water flowing from the roadside eateries. Above those neighborhood venues were rows of grey apartment buildings with crumbling exterior paint and rusting window frames. The Soviet-style former dormitory buildings were built for pragmatic use and had terrible internal lighting. Inside those poorly illuminated units, pink underwear and white baggy tank tops dangled on the clothesline above wood chests, the same wood chests I had last seen in Grandpa’s old apartment. Just like Ban’s protagonist, I quietly reacted, “Old people definitely lived there.”

Dongbei sometimes exists in Chinas cultural discourse as the joker, similar to the South in America. A Faulkner quote may encapsulate how I emoted on Shenyangs streets: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Staring at the apartment buildings, I found myself self-interrogating for finding familiarity in this real-life landscape that, to me, only existed in literature. I knew this wasn’t a place I belonged. Deep down, I knew that I might be unconsciously seeking to experience a Dongbeiness of my literary imagination. I’d always been repelled by bloggers who visited construction-site workers’ lunch stands or diners, commented on the deliciousness and cheapness of the food, and intoxicated themselves in their sense of “human connections” at these places. It was inherently violent to romanticize and consumerize what, for other people, was hardship and poverty.

My literary pilgrimage exposed me to a morally delicate position. The overbaked idea of the survivor’s guilt—surviving China’s tide of history—could not entirely encapsulate what I pondered. In America, my foreign passport gave me the authority to write about China and translate from Chinese, and my family tie with Dongbei was what drove me to explore the region. But when I found myself on the steamy and mildly odorous streets beneath Shenyang’s parasol trees, I realized that I needed to acknowledge—perhaps even confront—the possibility of gazing in my process of translation. No matter how I could claim my passion and connection, I had never needed to live a Dongbei life I aimed to translate. I found myself always questioning: how have I earned the right to work on my project? How do I know I’ll be able to represent Dongbei to an English-language audience not only via literature but also through the heaviness of its history?

I eventually discovered a reverse donkey next to an old warehouse—it traversed the narrow neighborhood lanes as if a normal tricycle was moving backward. An old man wearing a red t-shirt transported a pile of cardboard boxes in the freight box in front of him. A few feet away from him was a white $150K Range Rover. I had no idea how it squeezed through the narrow lanes in the neighborhood. I remembered what Mr. Wu told me about Dongbei’s heyday in the eighties, when he drove through these same neighborhoods on holiday evenings, how people crowded onto the streets to find taxis to go to galas and parties.

The cardboard boxes wobbled on the reverse donkey. I held my breath, hoping that they wouldn’t fall and spill on the streets.

 

 

Born in Beijing and living in Connecticut, Tony Hao is a literary translator of Chinese-language prose. His translation of Ban Yu’s Dongbei fiction has appeared in Crayon, the sister magazine of British literary journal Litro. He recently graduated from Yale, where he majored in English and studied fiction writing and literary translation

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Moon Hill

By SAM WHITE

The old man left the city because he was tired. He followed his doctor’s advice and went to the country to regain his energy. The exhaustion had come on slow, like a tide, or a spilled liquid stretching over the ground toward nothing. The doctor told him that Guangxi, six hours south by train, was known for the restorative properties of its water. He was surprised that a doctor of modern medicine would recommend such a traditional remedy, but he had heard of the region’s water, though he didn’t believe it. He had also heard that Guangxi was beautiful, and thought it would be welcome to relax, and see the place’s cascading hills at least once in his life. His sons didn’t answer when he called to tell them he was leaving. Their lives were well in motion, and he felt like an appendage—something vestigial, to be respected for a former purpose he now lacked.

Moon Hill
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Joss

By PATRICIA LIU 

Image of a river and houses on a hill.

Yunnan Province, China

Paper is thin. In the beginning, still billows in the wind, still petal-like, still grounded in this world 

of living. The incense is the only material that translates the viscera to mist. Early, the fog has not yet 

lifted, and we move through the white drip as if through total darkness. Fish lost in the deep under-

water. It is easy for water to find home in our bodies. How wonderful it is to think my father’s

dead father a translation of our living selves, the water in-between my cells, the same water of

ghosts. Of women and Buddha, of lotus flower and palace, of lion. See the shine of fire, even

now. See the smoke, encapsulated by the fog. My father tells stories of the state’s inexorable beckoning,

the brothers, and the sisters, too, sent to the countryside. What they remember most is the truck

and the dust, the broad shoulders of horse, that first night and its stars, the mass exodus of dragonflies

following the monsoons—but no, exodus is uniquely a human endeavor. My father cannot bring 

himself to anger; he knows it is shame that is the ugliest language. Somewhere, I have lost my place 

in the life-wheel, and the only words I know in Chinese are our names. Jiayu is rain. Jialei is rosebud. 

Only years later do I learn that Jiayu means jade. Only years later do I long for pure, unadulterated 

fortune over the ritual of early rain. Somehow, turn face to sky. Here. In memory, to burn is to revere.

Joss
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