Books & Poetry

Japanese culture is no less alien to most British people than Chinese culture. But for some reason we know a lot more about it. Ask anyone who regularly reads grown-up books to name a Japanese writer and they’ll almost certainly reply ‘Haruki Murakami’. There’s an outside chance they’ll also have heard of Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, and Yukio Mishima, whose bizarre ritual suicide had nothing to do with a fey ’80s pop star (David Sylvian) appropriating the title of one of his books (‘Forbidden Colours’) for a plinky-plonk song.

Ask them to name a Chinese writer, however, and, if they say anything at all, it will probably be ‘Jung Chang’ or ‘Xinran’. You can’t fault these answers on grounds of accuracy or indeed seriousness (their respective best-sellers ‘Wild Swans’ and ‘The Good Women of China’ are important books), but the fact remains that they’re migrant writers dealing primarily in non-fictional accounts of Chinese history and culture. Indigenous Chinese literature is among the world’s oldest, dating back to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770-256 BC). Why do we know so little about it? And isn’t it embarrassing that we don’t know more when our reflexive assumption is that the whole world knows about Shakespeare and Dickens?
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Yes, says Xinran, who was a successful journalist on Chinese radio before moving to London in 1997. She was ‘shocked and a bit hurt’ by the ignorance she encountered, which was more widespread than she’d imagined. ‘I taught at the University of London’s School of Oriental And African Studies, and before then I thought it was just ordinary people who didn’t read much from China or know about Chinese film or art or performance. But I was shocked by how little my colleagues and students knew. I was told that SOAS’s library of Chinese books was one of the best in Europe, but I read through the titles and actually they were very old and limited.’

This is part of a broader ignorance about China which Xinran attributes to the country having been completely cut off from the West until first the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century, and then the post-Mao economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. ‘A very respected journalist asked me once: How did you learn to swim? Do you have swimming pools in China?’ she remembers. ‘Most people have no idea about China at all.’

Novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo was brought up by her grandparents in a tiny fishing village in southern China. She moved to London in 2002, and her first novel in English, the smart comedy of cultural misunderstanding ‘A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers’, was shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize. Her experience of Western ignorance is similar to Xinran’s. She’s especially impatient with the clichéd view that Chinese culture continues to languish in the long shadow of the Cultural Revolution. ‘We have an official literature scene, but we also have a much stronger independent art world. It’s really easy and lazy to criticise a “communist” culture just like that – as if you could deny that Nabokov and Bulgakov are from the Soviet Union!’

Conversation about China in the West tends, she feels, to be overwhelmingly critical, and to dwell on politics rather than on art or individual artists. ‘How often do you have a conversation between an English novelist and a Chinese novelist? How often does a British college invite Chinese artists to give talks to students? I don’t believe the communication is fair if the individual voice is absent. That reminds me of the way the American government looks at Cuba.’

The sad truth, though, is that the British have little interest in translated foreign fiction, which accounts for only 3 per cent of fiction sales in the UK compared with 30 to 40 per cent in France or Spain. ‘The British prefer to read migrant or second-generation writers,’ says Dr Red Chan of the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. For her, the Western ignorance of Chinese literature is more about mismatched tastes than anything more sinister. ‘British readers like crime stories, but those kinds of stories are not written much by Chinese authors. Chinese readers like martial arts novels, or historical stories about the Three Kingdoms era. These are longstanding favourites which weren’t picked up on in the West until the film of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, which was a sort of multimedia adaptation of them.

‘Many Chinese writers are now very inward-looking and interested in things like the disparity of wealth and knowledge between urban and rural people. There are writers I love for their language and for what they provoke in China today – but those qualities don’t translate.’

A good example of this is Gao Xingjian, banned in his home country for referring to the Tiananmen Square massacre in a novel. Now resident in France, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 – but Dr Chan thinks it was for the wrong book. ‘He’s a true artist and he deserved the prize, but “Soul Mountain”, which is a travelogue, is quite fractured and disconnected. The beauty of it lies in the language, and that didn’t come out very well in the English translation.’

The difficulty of translating Chinese logograms into English without incurring a fatal loss of nuance is a big problem. ‘English is so young compared with Chinese, which is more than 3,000 years’ old,’ says Xinran, ‘and Chinese culture is much deeper than the language works for foreigners. We have more than 20 different titles for “wife”! It’s very hard to translate.’ Very hard, but not impossible. There are some skilful translators around: Dr Chan singles out John Minford for his rendering of Louis Cha’s bestseller (in China, at least) ‘The Deer and the Cauldron’.

It’s time we stopped finding excuses for our insularity and made an effort to engage with China. As Xinran observes: ‘If you have the same thing all the time you just get used to it. Like fish and chips. Or sweet-and-sour pork!’ She laughs. ‘No one in China eats sweet-and-sour pork!’

Xinran’s novel, ‘Sky Burial’, is out now. Xiaolu Guo’s new novel, ‘20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth’, will be published in January.