RAS China ‘Monographs’ Authors at the Beijing International Literary Festival

Posted: March 6th, 2014 | No Comments »

Both our 2014 RAS authors, Andrew Field and Diana Yeh, will appear to the Beijing International Literary Festival this March….

9 March 2014: China’s Lost Modernist:
Andrew Field on Mu Shiying

With Neil Schmid

When: 9 March 12:00 p.m.

Where: The Beijing Bookworm

Tickets: RMB 65

About:

When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers and Shanghai lost the most detailed chronicler of its demi-monde night life. In his recent publication of translation and commentary, Andrew Field argues that Mu Shiying advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of the May 4th giants Lu Xun and Lao She to even more starkly reveal the alienation at the heart of cosmopolitan Shanghai. Each of the five stories translated in Field’s book focus on the anxiety-ridden relationships of the modern city and its culture of consumption. Neil Schmid, a China scholar and honorary editor of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, will talk to Andrew Field about the life of this fascinating and forgotten citizen of Shanghai.

17 March 2014: The Happy Hsiungs:
Diana Yeh on a Chinese-British Literary Couple

With Alan Babbington-Smith

When: 17 March 1:00 p.m.

Where: The Beijing Bookworm

Tickets: RMB 65

About:

The Happy Hsiungs recovers the histories of a Chinese literary couple who lived, worked and wrote in Britain from the 1930s onwards. Shih-I Hsiung shot to worldwide fame with his play Lady Precious Stream, while Dymia Hsiung was the first Chinese woman to publish an account of life as an immigrant in Britain. Diana Yeh recounts the Hsiungs’ childhoods in turn-of-the-century China, their youth in the radical May 4th era, and their lives in Britain and the United States. Alan Babbington-Smith will discuss with Yeh how the Hsiungs’ “performed” identities conformed to Western ideals of gender, sexuality, and ‘Chineseness’.

---