I could have been published. I wrote a romantic story between two men, set in Republican Era China, and hadn’t realised I could write romance and love between woman and woman. One day I will publicly write queer. (In English.)

The editor’s voice bombed this household, like how when humans step into a bush all birds will hold beaks, running away. I left the house telephone number in the submission – I had a xiaolingtong, a budget mobile, but was not allowed to bring it to school. I smuggled it. But I was too worried I would miss the editor’s call, so I had to leak the telephone number. Like I knew the editor would call me.

The message landed on our lunch. Mama and baba’s faces were lotus flowers drenched in the storm. Clear and dripping. The editor couldn’t believe I was only 14. (I don’t believe, either.) Mama picked up the call; baba kept annoying me, asking me to show him the manuscript. Of course I didn’t. Or I won’t. And I can’t. My head was buried in the rice bowl, like the whole me, my whole body was shrinking, sinking into the steaming swirl. Baba buzzed with hidden pride at my pen name. I used it from then on.

These are all daytime scenes. I am not entitled to be invited to the night. And the long exhale was so long that it would crawl out from mama and baba’s room, biting my overheard tippy-toe.

A few days later, I was leaving the lunch table, and mama’s voice tangled me: I am warning you. Writing is the most dangerous thing in this world. You are too little, so just remember my words.

I can remember that I couldn’t wait to talk back: A lot of people are making money with writing and writing is exactly their career! Otherwise, what are we reading? Where can we get books? Because someone is writing!

But you are not someone’s daughter. You are from an ordinary family and you are just an ordinary girl. Give up and grow up, you will know what I mean. And all you need to do now is to prep for your exams. Be a good girl, OK? Me and your baba are making a living with so much hustle. Everything we have done is all for you. Have a think about us when you want to write this messy clutter.

Ma forgot that it was her fault. She dragged me into writing, into this muddy, clumsy pond. It’s she who dumped me books, trimmed my essay. Most of my nursery stories were made by her.

If I could, I would say: Ma, you really no need to worry.

14-year-old me didn’t have any ambition. All my longing was an iPhone 4. I guess 14‑year‑old me had a bit of talent in writing. If my work gets selected, the money will allow me to buy it. That’s all my dream. And my secret.

I fell in love with a girl. She’s my first love. Maybe ‘love’, in my unwitting heart, was only sharing one pair of wired earphones and smuggling drumbeat from an MP3 player in maths class. But I knew I love her. Mama didn’t like her because her hair was too short and sharp.

It’s our last year in middle school. Her parents were planning to send her abroad. No reason could beat them – no need for National College Entrance Examination in this province with another 600,000 young faces. I would die for an iPhone 4 to replace my xiaolingtong, for keeping in touch with her in time. Sharing pictures of lunch from canteen, or maybe reading fan fiction of our favourite K-pop band together. Virtually. Yet together.

If I could have asked: Ma, do you think we are an ordinary family? Or we are just pretending nothing happened, merrily?

Living in London in my late 20s, ex-council houses are my closest kinship. Windows stacked with duck-egg-blue frosted film, crowded. Like my hometown, the small town in northern China, and another land I don’t know how to call.

In crisp winters, the window is more like a slice. 6am, pigeons blasted over our pillows and pecked glass. We joke: they are living alarms, alerting us; don’t be late.

I saw millions of birds in London. Not the rare finds who will knock birdwatchers’ heartbeats, just ordinary birds. Pigeons, seagulls, magpies, crows. Like migrants. They hover around the sky and sea of this island every day. Freely. On clouds, god might have to give a way to them – to birds. But you know what I meant.

But I never saw swallows in London. Or, I overlooked them.

Ma said swallows only build nests under a blessed household. They bring good luck and blessings into the family and if you treat them well these little migrants will come back next spring. Your home is their home too. They only ask to settle under a roof, with mud, broken branches, artificial waste, and families. They live merrily only if you don’t banish them.

There’s a prose poem in my primary school textbook: The Song of the Stormy Petrel by Maxim Gorky. In Chinese, the bird’s name is ‘haiyan’ – ‘sea swallow’. I was hopeless at eating metaphors. I just swallowed words. In a gulp. In raw. I’ve forgotten everything the teacher said. I was only hoping this little bird could survive in the screaming storm, make it back to its temporary shelter. My confusion stumbled over there: why did sea swallow hope for a stronger storm? Why would it fight, against a little bird’s nature, against its wish to live? Nonsense.

Ma dumped piles of Russian and Soviet literature on me. She used to force me to read – her laolao, my great-grandma, is from the Soviet. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Mikhail Sholokhov…limping between borderlines, devouring me from paper.

I read everything with a flying hunger in my lungs. But mama’s picks were in exile. Characters in the books teased me. I didn’t get why Алёша is short for Алексей; translated into Chinese, they are in three and six characters, and their translated names don’t even share the same first character. Reading them was slicing me apart: one end is god, church, alcoholic husbands, affairs, winter taking someone’s son; the other is factories, workers, revolutions, people shuttering the empire.

Mama taught me to pronounce the authors’ names in Russian. I can’t gloss my tongue with the alveolar trill precisely, so I used Mandarin to copy the phonetics with my pious, also false, attempt. Maybe mama taught me in Mandarin too. I can’t recall. But I controlled the tone. The trick is to imagine you are standing on the ocean tide, naked, and then allow your mouth to flow with the wave.

Ma doesn’t like my micro-resistance. She repeated her laolao’s exile, saying she fled to China in the flock of upheaval. Everyone died. She survived. Only her.

The newborn swallows were opening mouths wide. Waiting.

It’s strange enough to live in a small orthodox town when your face isn’t Chinese enough. In my childhood, laolao wore wigs all the time, and mama hated my curls. My hair was black, tough, curly. I haunted mama to braid my hair with colourful rubber bands all day, and then with a ten-minute nap my head would become a chaotic nightclub. Much tighter, much better. Please. Mama. I always begged. I didn’t know I made her so much labour. Mama lied to me and cut my hair. Tears dripped and seasoned the offcuts. Salon is an animal trap. Ambushing. Chemical liquid had trimmed my hair, straightened me again and again. Or maybe ma just wanted to decorate me to be a purely perfect Chinese girl. Neat, behaved. She worried that people would judge her not a good mother. I couldn’t know. Or both. Wasn’t born as a boy, I’ve made mama criminal enough already.

Rarely, I saw laolao’s wig on the hook. A dangling nest, watching me back from dark.

For a long time, I always looked forward to flying to laolao’s home. At the doorstep, the door still open, she kissed my cheeks. Right, left, right. She bent down and held my face, looking carefully through me. Our little foreigner is coming home! Her nose rubbed my nose. Don’t say that. She is a Chinese one! Ma was not happy. Then they started fighting. I am used to it. My body was stretched to a battlefield, a small exclave, a puppet doll; their hands fiercely, gently pulled me towards two different lands’ authorities. Tear me apart.

I only want kisses. Kiss on eyelids. Kiss on forehead. Kiss on cheeks. Much and more. Dripping me away and away. Just take me away.

So my tears frightened the rice, burping. I choked; laolao blamed ma again with this new excuse, causing her to throw the blame to me. While a ghost sat around the table with us.

Until I saw it. In London Pride, surrounded by progress flags, floats, and balloons sailing from Canary Wharf, I saw the ghost. The protest banners in Chinese bleached my pride. Drowning in laughter, my face looked happy, while in hometown and homeland, girls and women and queers were still on chains. When chains, cage, prison are both metaphor and reality. Now I know metaphors very well.

Writing in native and non-native language is guilt: no space for writing queer in mother tongue, writing in English is a betrayal, a risky honour. A bleached laurel leaf. Bumping into my education rooted in parents’ money.

The haircut razor on my neck never leaves.

The knife I have been looking for, to put under my pillow: at 14, writing was not my priority. On many nights, I was overthinking about a well-known conversion clinic, the one only a two-hour drive away. I was overthinking about how if any ‘therapists’ break into my bedroom at mama and baba’s instruction and rob me away, a razor is not enough. I needed a knife. At least, I need a knife. But I can’t steal any from the kitchen. I never doubt ma would find out in seconds. She can sniff every desire under this roof. I am betting too. Bid on they love me enough so the knife is optional.

Like I observed the swallows under our roof, the ghost was just standing aside, observing me. We call it intimately: politics.

But I don’t know, great-grandma, are you standing there too? Standing together with the ghost, watching me? Can you tell me how to distinguish fear-driven migration and freedom-hunger driven? And what if fear is seeded in my blood? Like the sea swallow: the writer praised its brave move and ambition, but what if the little bird only wants to flee? To its home. Or whatever shelter there is, home or not.

When I checked every fragment in Russian history in the twentieth century, were you looking at me? Which mouldy paper with your braids woven down? To ask mama and laolao about you, I have to deal with the innocent failure of my coming out and mama’s command about marriage. Have not been home for years and years. Am still that little girl. Don’t dare to take home a horrible maths exam paper.

So how can I trace back?

I ask, and I know you won’t answer, yet I believe, ridiculously, that you are the only one who can understand me in this family. With desperate hope. Hope on a dead, a void, a person who I don’t know’s name, face, voice, and won’t ever echo me.

Maybe the sea swallow knows nothing, because the only thing they can do is fly. Like us. I don’t know if we are born in diaspora so we are becoming migrants, or if just because we are migrants diaspora is our final flyway.

I know you can’t answer me.

I refused to see laolao for many years. Forgive me. The war between ma and laolao never pauses. Before I left home, ma ordered me to visit her.

Laolao is growing shorter. At the doorstep, her arms stretched, swaying, held my face, looked through me vigilantly. Time floods back. She already knew our parting would be long as winters in Siberia.

In her dried and bare arms, her nose rubbed my nose. My kiss was on her hair whorl. I am much taller than her. Her real hair – black, tough, just like mine. With a tipped toe, her face nestled into the hollow of my neck. Clicking into place. Tears dripped down through my neck, collar, sewing a river between torn lands. A borderline. A melting.

Something glided through clouds, monsoons and ocean currents. Her kiss. Right. Left. Right. Transformed to a swallow. Finally, rest on my cheeks.

The post The Haircut Razor appeared first on English PEN.

Consider my parents’ first date, sharing
what they have in common: a history of being possessed

My parents’ first date shows up in my poem ‘Ancestry.com Has Nothing on Me’. It’s vague on the details, although I considered painting a more robust scene: a little cha chaan teng in Hong Kong where they shared milk tea and egg tarts, or perhaps a stop by a street vendor selling chai and samosas in India.

The truth is, I don’t know what my parents did on their first date, or even what country it was in. What I do know: my father’s family spent much – or perhaps, all – of his childhood in India, my mother grew up in Hong Kong, and somehow their paths crossed before they moved overseas to start a family in Canada. Both my parents knew the taste of samosas and jalebi, of rice and lap cheong, of chilli chicken and Hakka noodles. They shared these foods with me during my childhood in Vancouver, where I grew up in-between cultures, constantly trying my best to fit in. What they didn’t share were the details that surrounded their childhoods, how they met, their migration to Canada, and the toll it took on them.

I first came across the term ‘shadow histories’ in Jenny Banh’s essay ‘Chinese Restaurant Kids Speak about Labor, Lifeways, and Legacies’. Banh refers to a ‘shadow history’ of her family’s time in Southeast Asia that ‘would never be discussed’. Banh writes:

here is a lot of silence and misdirection in [my mother’s] statements to me. Dare I say resistance? She withholds many things from me, and I have to guess or imagine what she means. I think my family history consists of many imaginaries within and between the generations. Maybe within me as well…

Though this was my first time encountering the term “shadow history,” I immediately understood what Banh meant. A shadow history is an unspoken past that lurks in the background, often entangled in trauma, always actively haunting, yet never discussed or confronted head on. This was familiar to me in my lived experience with my family. Like Banh, I also had ‘a silent and evasive family,’ and I, too, learned ‘to not ask questions or talk too much.’

As a writer, I write to understand myself, to process experiences and emotions, and to connect with others. Like many aspiring writers, I was taught the adage ‘write what you know’. It’s sound advice that often produces interesting writing from different lived realities. While writing my poetry collection Familial Hungers, however, I found myself returning to what I didn’t know – aspects of my family’s past that had grown entangled into my life. How and where, exactly, did my parents meet? What were their childhoods like? What buried memories do they carry every day? Over time, my relationships with my family origins have amassed fractures resulting in ongoing breaks in communication. As such, I found myself unable to ask about details from my family’s history.

How, then, do you write about what you don’t know?

As it turns out, writing what you don’t know is made up of research, speculation, and imagination. I wrestled with the incomplete – and possibly inaccurate – facts presented in my poem. Research provided context to some of my questions – Hong Kong was a British colony, then occupied by the Japanese, then a British colony again, before finally becoming a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. There was, in fact, a sizeable Chinese community in India, specifically in Kolkata. India was an official British colony from 1858–1947. The Sino-Indian war occurred in 1962. I also had bits and pieces I remembered from my childhood: my mother had a British passport, her father was a sailor who would bring home gifts, she once talked about her family needing to escape India to go back to Hong Kong; my father had a ‘difficult’ childhood. These memories allowed me to begin questioning and speculating: Did my father spend his entire childhood in India? Did his family stay during and after the Sino-Indian war? How did my mother meet my father if she was living in Hong Kong? Did my mother also spend time in India? Could I make up a fake first date for them in my poem? Was it disingenuous to do so?

I found myself attempting to fill in the blanks of what I knew about my family history. Memory is famously unreliable, and my memories of what my mother did share with me in my childhood might be wildly inaccurate. What is the difference between truth and accuracy? How much do the details matter? My parents may never have even had a traditional first date, not the way I ask readers to imagine it in my poem. I ask the reader to imagine a whole host of probabilities whose details I myself don’t know: what it might have been like for my grandmother living through the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and the subsequent British re-establishment; the realities of being Chinese in India during the Sino-Indian War; my parents’ emigration and their sense of unbelonging in Canada. These imaginaries float between fact and speculation, uncorroborated stories pieced together from bits and pieces that approximate and become a personal history. They’re held together with research, memory, and imagination. What I initially considered controversial – imagination – serves its purpose in revealing an emotional truth. The poem, then, is an imagined family history that may or may not be accurate, studded with interruptions from the history of British colonisation and its lasting effects.

That said, I still worry about the accuracy of details, what my family might think when or if they read my poem, whether they might get caught up in the inaccuracy of the details, whether the emotional truth I am presenting rings true for them in the way it does for me. Whether that same truth will still resonate with me years down the line. As I worry, it occurs to me there are multiple definitions of worry: there is the commonly understood meaning of worry as related to anxiety, but there is also the way worry is used as a verb to describe repeatedly touching or disturbing something. A dog might worry at a bone, or a child might worry the edges of a blanket while falling asleep. While I write, I worry about the impacts of my imagined details while also worrying at the details – changing the location of a first date from a cha chaan teng in Hong Kong to a street vendor in India to something else entirely until the scene feels right. Maybe this worry is part and parcel of writing what I don’t know: doing my best to present an emotional truth while holding onto uncertainty, worrying the details, contemplating their fuzzy edges, and hoping what emerges rings true.

The post Shadow Histories: Writing What You Don’t Know appeared first on English PEN.

SHEN YANG: In 1971, the Chinese government launched a family-planning campaign which by 1982 had become a fundamental national policy. Its goal was to address poverty and the exhaustion of natural resources by slowing population growth; couples were limited to a single child, and any further babies were considered ‘illegal’, ‘excess-birth’ children.

The policy continued well into the new millennium, before being slightly relaxed in 2011, and again in 2013. In 2015, all married couples in China were told they could have two children. The following year, the ‘People’s Republic of China Population and Family Planning Law’ Article 18, paragraph 1, was amended to read: ‘The state encourages any couple to have two children’. And most recently, on 31 May 2021, it was announced that every couple is henceforth allowed to have up to three children. After more than thirty years, the One Child policy has been scrapped. (Not that there is much sign of enthusiasm to have more than one child, let alone three, at least among urban couples. Decades of the One Child policy have changed people’s ideas about family, and some have decided not to have children at all.)

NH: What made you decide to write your life story, and the story of the lives of other excess children?

SY: When people talk about the One Child policy, the one-child generation is always the focus: the loneliness they suffered as they grew up, the burden they have had to bear as adults, and the challenges they face now. By contrast, those, like me, who grew up shrouded in silence and secrecy, have been largely ignored. We broke the law the moment we were born simply because we were not the legitimate first child. We escaped abortion, but we couldn’t escape being abandoned. Sadly, 90% of us were baby girls.

Although the One Child era is being consigned to history, the wounds it inflicted over three decades have not healed. People lost their jobs and families were fined, women were injured, and baby girls were aborted or abandoned. Time only heals surface scratches, and there are still women with hearts full of pain.

According to official statistics, there are thirteen million ‘illegals’. But this is hard to believe – with China’s population of 1.4 billion, there must be more than that. Someone must be made responsible, because history cannot simply be erased. China must not forget its recent past as it develops and goes forward.

Yet there is a paucity of literature about excess-birth children. At this rate, when we depart this life in the natural course of things, our entire generation will disappear without a trace, and excess-births will become no more than a folk memory. Some of us must stand up bravely and make our voices heard. If we excess-birth children don’t take the initiative and record our own history, then who else will? And that’s exactly why I wanted to come out of the fog and write about us – the hidden generation, the illegal daughters.

NH: Behind every news sensation, there is the story of a human being. In your memoir, you have written about other excess-birth children whom you knew as a child or met through the publication of this book. Would you like to tell us about some of them?

SY: My childhood friend Wanjun was born prematurely with hydrocephalus as a result of the trauma her mother suffered during pregnancy: she spent much of it on the run from family-planning officers, to the point that she was overwhelmed by stress and unable to eat or sleep properly. Today, Wanjun is disabled and living with her parents. If there had been no One Child policy – if her mother had been treated with respect during her pregnancy – things might have been different.

Since my book was published, I have received emails from other excess-birth children sharing their stories with me. One girl, who, like me, was the second illegal daughter and brought up by relatives, told me that when she was young she felt very much alone. She thought she was the only one who was living like a ghost, with the feeling of abandonment haunting her constantly. Though she survived being aborted as an excess-birth child, she didn’t feel lucky at all. She felt ashamed that she was a burden to her family, and she hated herself for being a girl. She is still struggling to cope with the consequences of her turbulent childhood, although she has found solace in writing down her emotions and sharing them with other excess-birth girls.

Another young woman (I first met her at my book launch on 13 November 2021) has become a good friend. As the third illegal daughter, she was given away immediately after she was born, to a family who had been unable to conceive. Ironically, a year after her arrival, her adoptive mother became pregnant and had a boy. The family could not give her back to her biological parents and felt it would be cruel to abandon her a second time, so kept her, but treated her with indifference, lavishing all their love on the boy. She was nothing but an extra mouth to feed. This young woman has been permanently scarred by growing up unwanted, and still struggles, at 33, to find a sense of identity, and the meaning of her existence.

All of us excess-birth girls feel a natural connection with each other. We can share without feeling judged. Growing up as illegal daughters has not been easy for any of us, but we have all managed, in one way or another. In fact, in writing and publishing this book, I have come across many other excess-birth girls who have shared their stories with the world, through art, documentaries, photo books or podcasts. We are never alone; there is an army of us out there. And I look forward to the day when more and more invisible girls will stand up bravely and make their voices heard.

NH: Forgiveness: one of the most moving parts of your memoir is when you talk about growing up and coming to terms with the abuse you suffered. In particular, you write about a letter from your uncle. Could you tell us about that, and about how you feel about forgiveness and what it has meant to you to forgive your family members?

SY: The aunt and uncle who fostered me were an unhappy couple. My aunt had gone to primary school but could scarcely read and write. My uncle graduated from high school and used to read poetry. These two people with absolutely nothing in common had been thrown together and were fettered to their marriage by politics and old customs. It was a union typical of those times. They quarrelled constantly over the slightest thing, and even came to blows, but neither would give way to the other. So by the time I arrived, things could not have been more dramatic: a man, victim of the Cultural Revolution, a woman, victim of an unhappy marriage, and a five-year-old girl, victim of the One Child policy, all living under the same roof.

There was a time when I hated my aunt and uncle for taking me in and making me suffer – hated them for ruining my happy early years with my grandparents. I used to long to go home and leave that loveless family.

However, as I grew up, I began to understand how they had suffered, and I came to terms with the past. One policy can really change one’s life. It was only many years later that I learned that my uncle had lost his mother at the age of three, and had had a loveless childhood too. A top student in high school, he dreamed of going to university, but was forced to drop out of school and work in the fields because of his family’s ‘bad’ political background. He was a depressed and frustrated man when he married my aunt, a near-illiterate woman with a vile temper. But eventually, after many years, he finally recognised her contribution to their family and acknowledged the sacrifices she had made.

He wrote in his letter:

Yangyang, please forgive the mistakes we made. Our generation finds it hard to talk about everything we suffered. The misfortunes of our family, the lack of affection, the hardships, and our resentment of the injustices of those times deprived us of love and we never learnt how to express it. This was true for our children, and the same is true for you. When you get to my age, you see things clearly. As you said, one’s personality determines one’s fate, and my timidity and weakness made me passive, so that I ended up in this small village. And your aunt, the woman I rejected in my innermost being from the word go, has stayed with me all these years, brought up my children and helped me keep the family going. If it were not for her, I would have stayed a bachelor, I am sure of that.

Personally, I came to realise that, no matter how much I hated those who hurt me, the hurt could not be erased. The only result of hate would be to trap me in pain that would only get worse. There was no point in resenting my aunt, or even society in general. What did help me was to cut myself off from that harm, and not to let those feelings control my life.

I don’t want to encourage people to forgive their abusers too easily; everyone has their own way of dealing with trauma. If you can forgive, that’s great, but if you can’t, just focus on doing things that make you feel positive about your life.

NH: My final question is about a scandal that has filled social media in China recently: the trafficking and forced marriage of women. While I understand that this is not a problem you touch on in your memoir, would you like to say something about this?

SY: It has to do with an age-old preference for male offspring. City-dwellers may decide to stop at one child, whatever its gender, or have none at all, but in rural areas, traditional social attitudes prevail. It is deeply rooted in people’s minds that boys are ‘better’ than girls. Sons are the pillars of the family and the bearers of the family name, while daughters are ‘the water that will be poured out of the house’. Under the One Child policy, in order to have a son at all costs, people aborted millions of baby girls. This led to a marked gender inequality: there are now 30 million more men than women in China.

Many villages are now denuded of women. They get jobs in nearby towns, where the work is better-paid and less arduous; the more courageous ones have made the move to study or work in big cities or even abroad. The result has been a dramatic increase in the trafficking of young women – especially from remote areas of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, or from Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam or Cambodia – who are then forced into marriages with village men (like the ‘chained woman’ in Fengxian, Jiangsu Province, the case you’re referring to).

China has been working for years (without much success) to put a stop to human trafficking – not that this is widely known. If it weren’t for the latest TikTok videos of the battered, dishevelled chained woman in Fengxian, who was trafficked, given a false identity, and forced to live with a man for whom she bore one son after another, people would never have realised how serious the situation is for all women in China. Yes, all Chinese women. It could happen to any one of us. There are many cases of young girls who have been seized from city streets, even in broad daylight. They are smuggled to isolated villages, forced to marry bachelors who treat them as their property, and become slaves and tools for reproduction. They have no means of escape and are never respected as human beings, even if they manage to give birth to a son.

As an excess-birth child, an illegal daughter who used to hide in the shadows, I got a chance to make my voice heard in the end, as have many other excess-birth children. By contrast, most trafficked women are trapped in the villages and silenced. Those who have managed to speak out about their plight have been accused of being mentally ill, or are otherwise stigmatised and threatened by the local government, with social media posts about them immediately deleted. It is said that the TikTok video of the chained-up woman was originally uploaded by a young villager to raise money for the large family (she has given birth to eight sons). Instead, it provoked public fury and put her buyer in jail. The chain on the neck of the woman is clearly visible, but what about the invisible chains around the necks of other trafficked women in China? The Fengxian victim is now being cared for in hospital, but who is going to rescue all the others who are still living through this hell?

What is even more depressing is the legal void around this crime. If you buy illegal plants in China you have to serve seven years in prison; if you buy endangered animals you can incur life imprisonment or even the death penalty. But if you buy a trafficked woman, the maximum is three years in jail! It is ridiculous that national law fails to protect women’s rights, and yet is now putting pressure on them to make more babies for their country. It is time that Chinese women took control of their own bodies.

Born in Shandong, Shen Yang came to the world as an excess child and does not legally exist. As one of the millions of China’s ‘invisible children’, she was forced to live in the shadows of the Chinese society. Amidst a troubled childhood, Shen Yang found solace in literature and graduated in Applied English. She has since completed a scriptwriting course in Beijing Film Academy and now lives in Shanghai, where she crafts her latest works.

Nicky Harman is a UK-based prize-winning literary translator, working from Chinese to English and focusing on contemporary fiction, literary nonfiction, and occasionally poetry, by a wide variety of authors. When not translating, she spends time promoting contemporary Chinese fiction to English-language readers. She volunteers for Paper Republic, a nonprofit registered in the UK, where she is also a trustee. She writes blogs (for instance, the Asian Books Blog), gives talks and lectures, and takes part in literary events and festivals, especially with the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. She also mentors new translators, teaches summer schools (Norwich, London, Warwick, and Bristol), and judges translation competitions. She tweets, with Helen Wang, as the China Fiction Bookclub @cfbcuk. She taught on the MSc in Translation at Imperial College until 2011 and was co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors) 2014–2017.7.

The post My Crime, Being Born Illegal: Shen Yang in Conversation with Nicky Harman appeared first on English PEN.

Shanghai is one of the most international, inclusive and diverse cities in China. It’s been so for a long time: a hundred years ago, it was the centre of culture and finance in the Far East. So I wouldn’t simplify the characteristics of Shanghai literature down to the linguistic or landmark level, but rather, much deeper, to the spirit of Shanghai. This spirit is reflected in Chinese character ‘海’ in the name of the city, which means, at once, the ocean, fullness of possibilities, inclusiveness, wide openness. I think that’s what makes Shanghai literature Shanghai literature.

Is there something inherent to Shanghai that lends itself to sci-fi or speculative fiction? Does its particular reality allow you to imagine unrealities that might in the future become truths?

Shanghai has all the elements we usually expect in speculative fiction: mega-sized metropolitanism, LED screens growing skywards into the air, skyscrapers co-existing with mean back-streets, natives and foreigners living side-by-side. But deep down I think it’s the collision and mixture of culture from the West and the East that makes it so imaginary. Just as Bladerunner, in 1982, imagined Los Angeles in 2019, full of geisha simulacra, when I walk the streets of Shanghai I wonder what it could be like in 2149. The city might be under the water, or it might be totally, autonomously governed by AI. All is possible, and all has something to do with the collision of the West and the East.

You have said you haven’t been particularly touched by censorship. Do you think this is related to what you write about, and how you write about it, or is it more to do with fortune?

If we don’t know why and how we are censored – if its logic remains unclear and silent – then we cannot know why and how we aren’t censored. It’s not only happening in China; as I’ve always said, impingement on freedom of expression is universal and, more and more often, it blurs the line between the protection and invasion of people’s value systems – which is greatly harmful.

There are AI-generated passages in ‘State of Trance’, created by a machine that has learnt your style and crafted work from it. I want to ask what the results make you consider/question more: the capacity of AI to write, or your own capacity in writing?

It’s both. As computation power grows, AI approaches the ability of humans on all levels, including creativity. Now it might sound fanciful or surrendering, but the real question is how to leverage AI for  our own self-improvement. I’ve been greatly inspired by AI-writing, and I don’t think this relationship will be one of mastery and subservience; more likely it will be one of partnership.

‘The most lethal threats often come from the self’ is a line that stayed with me. Perhaps I am wresting this phrase from its framing but, how do you think this idea relates to our current context?

Well, our current context isn’t War of the Worlds. COVID-19 doesn’t come from a world external to ours to beat us; coronaviruses are always there, co-existing with us, and all the species of the earth. It’s our system, our beliefs, our lifestyles, our arrogance, our human-centrism that beat us. If not this time, in the future, when this happens again, we may be beaten if we do not change. Self-reflection is crucial for everyone – that’s what that line means. And so, yes, it’s of great relevance to our moment, and what might follow it.

More broadly, what role does literature have to play in this moment and its aftermath – both in China and globally?

Literature resonates and connects – connects people to history and to each other. It connects us to those who are living in totally different conditions, cultural contexts, faded dynasties, exotic planets, but all the while holds on to belief in humanity. It allows us to gain love and strength when we need it, and to give it away to others when they do. 

Your protagonist spends their (we only know this character as ‘you’) apocalyptic time trying to return a book. Do you think they would have the same urge if they were under lock-down at the moment?

Ha – I think for us who live in reality, the urge should be to stay safe and keep on distancing, while we read the books that comfort our anxieties and release our depression. I guess, though, that the librarian would give you a ‘lock-down extension’.

Chen Qiufan (born 1981), also known as Stanley Chan, is a science fiction writer, columnist, and scriptwriter. His first novel The Waste Tide, (originally published in 2013) has been translated into English by Ken Liu and published by Tor & Head of Zeus in 2019. His short stories have won three Galaxy Awards for Chinese Science Fiction, and twelve Nebula Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Chinese. “The Fish of Lijiang” received the Best Short Form Award for the 2012 Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards. His stories have been published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, MIT Technology Review, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best SF, Interzone, and Lightspeed, as well as influential Chinese science fiction magazine Science Fiction World.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

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