sorana_necula_reset

The setting of  The Interior  is summer 1997—China "post-  Deng Xiaoping ", a period characterized by "an unholy alliance between post-Deng Communism (' market socialism ') and American capitalism", the China of  Jiang Zemin . In the novel the narrator speaks about the times in more personal terms: "As the saying went, the blade of grass points where the wind blows. The only problem was that the wind was blowing in so many directions these days no one could completely protect himself". The plot centers on the conniving of American and Chinese businessmen to exploit poorly paid Chinese workers, especially women, for profit and power. See describes in great detail the dangers women face because they work in an American toy factory, located in a remote part of the interior of China, that lacks adequate safety protections and is a virtual fire trap.   Miaoshan was working at the toy factory before her death. Elisabeth Sherwin quotes Lisa See speakin...

Shan Sa has an extraordinary CV. Born in Beijing, she started writing at seven and enjoyed success as a teenage poet. At 18 she moved to Paris to study, worked for the artist Balthus and won a Goncourt with her first novel (she writes in French), a Prix Cazes for her second and another Goncourt for this, her third, which is also being filmed. At a time when Chinese women's fiction in translation tends to be auto-biographical, it is a relief to discover The Girl Who Played Go . Shan Sa's first book to be translated into English shows her to be more interested in narrative form and history than in self-exploration. A carefully wrought novel, set within the framework of the board game, go, it takes place in a small city in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1936. An unnamed Japanese soldier has been sent with his battalion to seek out the Chinese resistance movement within the region, a gateway, he believes, for the glorious death that has long been his ambition. Meanwhile, a bored...

Set in the 1960s, Judy Fong Bates’s much-talked-about debut novel is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a small Ontario town’s solitary Chinese family, whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets. Through Su-Jen’s eyes, the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Cafe unfolds. As Su-Jen’s father works continually for a better future, her mother, a beautiful but embittered woman, settles uneasily into their new life. Su-Jen feels the weight of her mother’s unhappiness as Su-Jen’s life takes her outside the restaurant and far from the customs of the traditional past. When Su-Jen’s half-brother arrives, smouldering under the responsibilities he must bear as the dutiful Chinese son, he forms an alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, one that will have devastating consequences. Written in spare, intimate prose,  Midnight at the Dragon Cafe  is a vivid portrait of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unfulfilled long...

Despite her frank, pragmatic outward persona, would-be novelist Lily Lin is a romantic at heart. Tales of her childhood homeland have always captivated her, and she has always held a certain nostalgia for the famed  Silk Road. So when Lily receives an offer from a mysterious benefactor that will see her inheriting three million dollars in exchange for travelling the Silk Road–and undertaking a few admittedly odd tasks besides, she scarcely hesitates before booking her ticket. In China she finds herself a world away from her domineering married boyfriend and her minimum wage job: instead she finds herself caught up in the nuances of life in, for the most part, rural China. Her trip takes her to remote Buddhist temples, to Uyghur settlements, and through exquisite, challenging landscapes. And of course, Lily finds herself falling in love… Books in which the protagonist finds themselves on the receiving end of a life-changing sum of money abound. There’s Patricia Wood’s   Lott...