The Open University invites us to the 6th session of their Modern Chinese literature online book club on Friday 12th April, 1-2pm UK time (8-9pm Beijing time).

All are welcome to attend and you do not need to have attended any of their prior book club sessions. The session is informal, friendly and held in English.

A note from them on their book club:

“In this session, we’ll be discussing the story Mister Lover (舅舅情人) by WANG Xiaobo (王小波)and translated by Eric Abrahamsen.

You can read the story in Chinese here and a full translation in English on the Paper Republic website here

About the facilitators:

Emily Jones – Emily Jones is a founding Trustee of Paper Republic, a charity which promotes Chinese literature in English translation. She is a graduate of Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge (1998 – 2002). She also studied Chinese at the Chinese universities of Ningbo and Qingdao and was the recipient of a British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship in translation in 2011. Her publications include novels such as Black Holes (性之罪 ) by He Jiahong (何家弘); short stories such as Fiction and Other Stories (李喬短篇小說精選集) by Lee Chiao
(李喬), as well as poetry.

We are delighted that two translators familiar with Wang Xiaobo’s work will be joining us for the session, Jason Sommer and Zhang Hongling.

Their translations of Wang Xiaobo were published by State University of New York Press in 2007 in the volume titled Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo . The novellas in that collection are “2015,” “The Golden Age,” and “East Palace, West Palace,” the third being the title of the film adaptation of “Sentiments Like Water.” As we note in the book’s introduction, the story was written expressly for the film, virtually simultaneously, and the film was responsible for perhaps Wang’s widest recognition in the west.

Hongling also wrote an article in 2021, published by The China Project on the anniversary of his death. The article, titled ‘The yin and yang worlds of a Chinese Literary Outlier’ offers some insights into his life and writings. You may want to read this for further background on Wang Xiaobo: The yin and yang worlds of a Chinese literary outlier – The China Project.

Jason’s latest publication is the memoir Shmuel’s Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with My Survivor Father. He is author of five poetry collections: most recently Portulans in the University of Chicago Press’s Phoenix Poets Series. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he has won a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award and has held fellowships at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writer’s conferences. He has published translations of Irish language poems and, with Hongling, collaborative book-length translations of Chinese fiction: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo and The Bathing Women by Tie Ning, which was longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize.

For questions to consider for the discussion, please visit our webpage here.

To attend, please register on Eventbrite here.

The session will be held on Zoom and the link will be sent to you closer to the date. We look forward to seeing you
there!

The Online Confucius Institute team at the Open University (online-ci@open.ac.uk)”