Lit Fest Time Down Shanghai Way

It’s impossible to list all the good stuff at the Shanghai International Literary Festival this March (though you can see the whole shebang of a programme here with all ticket details). Here’s a few China-related events that may be of specific interest to readers of this blog…

• Thursday 7th – 12pm – Shelly Bryant (translator of Northern Girls) and Linda Jaivin talk about translation and the issues therein
• Saturday 9th – 2pm – Michael Vatikiotis talks about SE Asian lit
• Sunday 10th – 3pm – James Fallows on Can China Make it?
• Friday 15th – 7pm – Unsavory Elements launch of ex-pat tales with various writers
• Saturday 16th – 3pm – Disappearing Shanghai with Howard French and Qiu Xiaolong

Lit Fest Time Down Chengdu Way – 8-24 March 2013 – A Few Recommendations

The China Lit Fest season is getting underway again – Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou…and of course the Chengdu Bookworm. Lots going on – click here for full details.

I’d note a few especially interesting things for readers of this blog

8th March – Sichuan women writers Wang Erbei, Zhou Yuxia, Liao Hui, Yan Ge and Liu Guoxin get together on International Women’s Day to discuss women writers in contemporary Chinese society, and how their experience differs across the generations.

9th March – Derek Sandhaus (he of Tales of Old Peking and the reissued Backhouse classic Decadence Mandchoue) will be talking about his new book project on baijiu – warning – some of the “liquid razor blades” may be imbibed at this session

10th March – Jen Lin-Liu, Tom Miller and Derek Sandhaus, three China-based writers whose work and experience covers everything from blogging, journalism and memoir to history and social change, discuss the highs and lows of their writing life and what the future holds for writing on China.

11th March – Tom Miller, author of China’s Urban Billion, speaks on the challenges and potential solutions to China’s rapid urbanisation.

18th March – The Devouring Dragon looks at how an ascending China has rapidly surpassed the U.S. and Europe as the planet’s worst-polluting superpower. Craig Simons argues that China’s most important 21st-century legacy will be determined by how quickly its growth degrades the global environment and whether it can stem the damage.

19th March – Burma time – The Lady and the Peacock is journalist Peter Popham’s biography of “The Lady”, a revealing and illuminating look into celebrated Burmese politician and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi’s vision and courage as she sought to change her country.

24th March – In The View from the Plateau one of Sichuan’s most prominent writers, A Lai, will discuss his novels, their Tibetan setting, his rise to literary fame and his take on editing the largest-circulation sci-fi magazine in the world.

Another Little “Old China” Mystery Solved – PR Chalmers

I blogged the other days a short poem called Old China that featured, anonymously, in a 1914 edition of Punch in London. And so my thanks to Robert Bickers of Bristol University (and, of course, numerous works and scholarship on China including the great Empire Made Me and The Scramble for China) for letting me know that the poem was penned by one Patrick Reginald (PR) Chalmers (1872-1942). Mr Chalmers, who was Irish, apparently penned rather a lot of books about shooting, hunting, fishing and deerstalking as well as being a prolific biographer (his subjects included Kenneth Grahame and JM Barrie). He wrote regularly for Punch and The Field, mostly poems also about hunting, fishing and Irish country life. So that’s the author identified, though quite why he decided to stop writing about Ireland, country pursuits and shooting things and pen a ditty about old China with plenty of Chinoiserie motifs is still not really clear. Afraid I don’t have a picture of him but here’s a rather nice old cover of one of his country pursuits tomes…

Conserving Heritage Hand in Hand – 20th Anniversary of the Lord Wilson Heritage Trust

If you happen to be in Hong Kong I’d suggest popping down to the basement of Pacific Place where the Lord Wilson Heritage Trust has a display about its work and about Hong Kong heritage. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Trust has created a roving exhibition to be staged at four locations in Hong Kong – it’s at Pacific Place at the moment. The exhibition includes a display of how the early Pokfulam community was formed, why deity boats also take part in the Dragon Boat Water Parade in Tai O, what meanings the ornaments in vernacular architecture carry and what dialects the early indigenous inhabitants spoke, etc. There are also some fascinating objects from the collection of James Wong of everyday ephemera in post-war Hong Kong – books, music, products etc. More details of the exhibit and the Trust here.

The RTHK Studios Hong Kong…and some gates

I’ve gone about old gates on this blog before (I know, it’s all a bit obscure). Anyway, I was up at RTHK in Hong Kong the other day on The Morning Brew with Phil Wealan talking Midnight in Peking, Badlands and all that. I love the RTHK Broadcasting House (廣播大廈) building on Broadcast Drive in Kowloon Tong – it has a real 1960s feel on technology and broadcasting. RTHK moved into the building in 1969

Of course over the years the building has changed – actually I think not so much inside – still today it has the feel of the interior of the old Broadcasting House on Portland Place, now superseded by the new Broadcasting House round the corner. And so to get back to gates – Interesting to me is that the entrance appears to have moved since the start – obviously security concerns and all that – but, as these pictures poorly indicate because they’re hard to snap – it does appear there were some nice designed gates that originally led into the complex and that are now all blocked up.

Americans Undercover in Wartime China – The Rice Paddy Navy

Of course, it goes without saying, this book caught my eye – The Rice Paddy Navy: US Sailors Undercover in China During WW2 by Linda Kush….

Hong Kong Royal Asiatic Society – Lao She: A Chinese Writer in Modernist London – 4/3/13

Lao She: A Chinese Writer in Modernist London

Monday • 4 March 2013

Sent by missionaries to teach Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies, Lao She arrived in London in 1924, a city brimming with prejudice, where tourists visited the East End’s infamous Chinatown to search for opium dens and experience the Yellow Peril at first hand. The fiction and essays Lao She wrote during these years reflect his experience of missionary condescension and popular panic, while his engagement with literary high modernism shaped his emergence as one of twentieth-century China’s most eminent writers. Anne Witchard will examine the encounter between Chinese and British intellectual lives in the modernist milieu of 1920s London and discuss Lao She’s great novel Er Ma (Mr Ma and Son) with its panorama of London life from Limehouse cafes to Bloomsbury boarding houses, a city where the shadow of Dr Fu Manchu permeated popular culture and had an all too real effect of the lives of the Chinese people who lived there.

Anne Witchard is a lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, London. She is the author of Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Ashgate 2009), co-editor of London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (Continuum 2010), author of Lao She in London (HKUP 2012) and editor of Modernism and Chinoiserie (forthcoming EUP (2014)

Speaker:        Dr Anne Witchard

Date/Time:    Monday 4^th March 2013 / 6.30pm

Venue:           Extension Services Room. 8/F, City Hall High Block, Central

Admission:    Free Admission – No reserved seats.

Norway Gets Midnatt i Peking

This is my first post in Norwegian! Midnight in Peking is now out in Norwegian – I have to say this is quite satisfying given how much crime fiction has been coming from Norway to the rest of the world in recent years, I feel I may be slightly easing the trade balance here!!. Anyway, here’s the details for my Norwegian readers of Midnatt i Peking from the great publishers Forlaget Oktober and translator Erik Krogstad…

Midnatt i Peking

Mordet som rystet det gamle Kinas siste dager

En iskald januarmorgen i 1937 blir liket av Pamela Werner, adoptivdatteren til den tidligere britiske konsulen E.T.C. Werner, funnet ved foten av det myteomspunne Revetårnet i Peking. Pamela ble 19 år, og hjertet hennes er skåret ut.

Mordet opprører en hel verden med sin bestialitet, og fascinerer med mistanker og rykter som går i alle retninger: Er morderen en av de japanske soldatene som omringer byen? Eller et medlem av triadene? Rektoren på skolen? En av
reveåndene som flakker rundt på kirkegårdene?

Etterforskningsteamet består av en britisk og en kinesisk politimann, men de klarer ikke å løse saken.

Bare  E.T.C. Werner gir ikke opp. Han forfølger spor som går til Legasjonskvarteret der utlendingene bor i sine store hus, og til bordellene og heroinbulene i Slummen. Men ingen vil høre på strømmen av henvendelser fra en desperat far. Da japanerne kort tid etter inntar Peking, blir Werner deportert til en av deres uhyggelige fangeleire.

75 år senere kommer historikeren Paul French tilfeldigvis over mappen med E.T.C. Werners papirer og brev i Scotland Yards arkiver. Nå kommer sannheten for en dag – mer urovekkende og forferdelig enn noen kunne tenke seg.

“Dette er en skikkelig mordhistore, godt fortalt, med all den ekstra bonus en kunnskapsrik turguide til det gamle Kina kan bidra med. Takknemlige lesere kan knapt be om mer.” THE WASHINGTON POST