{"id":1562,"date":"2013-01-31T10:30:51","date_gmt":"2013-01-31T02:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1562"},"modified":"2013-01-22T11:45:15","modified_gmt":"2013-01-22T03:45:15","slug":"eric-hayot-on-china-from-middlebrow-to-highbrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1562","title":{"rendered":"Eric Hayot on China, From Middlebrow to Highbrow"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" <\/a>At Public Books <\/a>Eric Hayot writes about the presentation of China in literature available to readers of English, by way of a review of Gail Tsukiyama’s A Hundred Flowers<\/em>, Christopher Buckley’s They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?<\/em>, Dung Kai-cheung’s\u00a0\u8463\u555f\u7ae0 Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City <\/em>(translated by the author with Bonnie \"\" <\/a>McDougall and Anders Hansson), and Lenin’s Kisses<\/em> by Yan Lianke\u00a0\u960e\u8fde\u79d1 (translated by Carlos Rojas). Here’s how Hayot frames his discussion:<\/p>\n

… these four novels\u2014two satires, one melodrama, and one modernist pseudo-documentary\u2014might all be grasped as part of the contemporary social call to understand China, to see it clearly, to name or frame it, to place it in relation to local or global politics, or to locate it inside recent or universal world history. In the \"\" <\/a>last decade economic historians like Ban Wang and Kenneth Pomeranz have demonstrated that the Chinese economy dominated the planet from about 500 to 1500 CE, creating the world\u2019s first global economic system. The possibility of China\u2019s return to that position of dominance\u2014and here I ask all readers to call up a mental image of a sleeping dragon awakening\u2014is what has folks on both sides of the Pacific trembling, in fear or glee, for the \u201cChinese century\u201d to succeed the American one. \u201cChina\u201d is thus one of the names of the global future as we imagine it.<\/p>\n

China is also, therefore, an intellectual and social \"\" <\/a>problem, for everyone. What is China to us today\u2014assuming the \u201cus\u201d includes (and how could it not?) the wide variety of people who think of themselves as \u201cChinese\u201d? What kind of place is it? What must we know to comprehend its nature (if it has one)? What would it mean to recognize ourselves (again, the first person plural includes the Chinese) as people who want to know what China is, and who are willing to work hard, as authors and as readers, to understand it? How will such an understanding return us, like fiction, to a new vision of the world we have known until now?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click on any of the images to link to the essay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Public Books Eric Hayot writes about the presentation of China in literature available to readers of English, by way of a review of Gail Tsukiyama’s A Hundred Flowers, Christopher Buckley’s They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, Dung Kai-cheung’s\u00a0\u8463\u555f\u7ae0 Atlas: The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[16,1],"tags":[430,429,920,917,428,919,918,550],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8srwF-pc","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1592,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1592","url_meta":{"origin":1562,"position":0},"title":"Lucas Klein on Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"January 24, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"My review of Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, by Dung Kai-cheung \u8463\u555f\u7ae0 and translated by the author with Anders Hansson and Bonnie S. McDougall, has been posted at Rain Taxi. Here's how it begins: \"No one, wise Kublai,\u201d says Marco Polo in Italo Calvino\u2019s Invisible Cities, \u201cknows better\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":793,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=793","url_meta":{"origin":1562,"position":1},"title":"Interview with Dung Kai-cheung","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"March 13, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The Hong Kong Advanced Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Studies has just posted Cris Mattison's interview with Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung \u8463\u555f\u7ae0, one of the SAR's most inventive authors. His novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City \u5730\u5716\u96c6, which mixes fiction with documentary history to chronicle the city of Hong\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1920,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1920","url_meta":{"origin":1562,"position":2},"title":"Sebastian Veg: Putting Hong Kong’s New Cultural Activism on the Literary Map","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"May 15, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Sebastian Veg's review essay of City at the End of Time: Poems by Leung Ping-Kwan \u6881\u79c9\u921e (edited by Esther Cheung) and Dung Kai-cheung\u2019s\u00a0\u8463\u555f\u7ae0\u00a0Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (translated by the author with Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson), titled \"Putting Hong Kong's New Cultural Activism on the Literary Map,\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3813,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3813","url_meta":{"origin":1562,"position":3},"title":"Feeley’s Xi Xi on National Translation Award Longlist","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"June 28, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The National Translation Award Longlists for Poetry and Prose have been released--and Chinese poetry is represented in the form of Jennifer Feeley's translation of Not Written Words \u4e0d\u662f\u6587\u5b57, by Hong Kong writer Xi Xi \u897f\u897f. (For some reason the publisher is listed as New Mexico State University, but actually the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static.wixstatic.com\/media\/2b6d8d_34b8d3d08c654720a23e7b723031f6ea.jpg\/v1\/fill\/w_400,h_536,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01\/2b6d8d_34b8d3d08c654720a23e7b723031f6ea.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1306,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1306","url_meta":{"origin":1562,"position":4},"title":"Found in Translation: Five Chinese Books You Should Read","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"October 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"In yesterday's post on the review of Bei Dao's The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems (New Directions, edited by Eliot Weinberger), I also mentioned the short collection of Bei Dao's poetry Endure (Black Widow Press), which I translated with Clayton Eshleman. 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