China Archives – ZYZZYVA

‘Forbidden City’ by Vanessa Hua: Beauty in the Brokenness

by Pia Chatterjee

May 10, 2022

Posted on May 10, 2022 (May 10, 2022) by Zack Ravas

It is an age-old tale: a young woman escapes the constraints of her provincial life to make her way to the big city, only to fall victim there to the machinations of an older, powerful man. But Vanessa Hua’s Forbidden City (353 pages; Ballantine Books), set in China just before the dawn of Mao’s Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, takes this trope and cunningly turns it on its head, making for one of the most compelling works of feminist and historical fiction in recent years. Unlike stereotypical ingenues, teenage Mei is morally ambiguous and neither beautiful nor beloved. She connives her way […]

The Third Daughter

by Vanessa Hua

March 15, 2022

Posted on March 15, 2022 (March 14, 2022) by Zack Ravas

The Chairman is dead. Outside, the people of Chinatown are cheering. They light firecrackers and beat pots and pans, chanting as they march three floors below the window of my apartment. Their signs say, “Smash the Emperor!” Drips of paint spoil the sweep and curve of the calligraphy, the characters bleeding as if shot. Shouts

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Dreamwalking in the Modern World: ‘The Day the Sun Died’ by Yan Lianke

by Casey Jong

January 28, 2019

Posted on January 28, 2019 (September 3, 2019) by Zack Ravas

Yan Lianke’s latest novel, The Day the Sun Died (342 pages; Grove Press; translated by Carlos Rojas), manages to strike a balance between humor and horror as the world crumbles over the course of one very long night in Gaotian Village, China. The story is told from the perspective of fourteen-year-old Li Niannian, whose parents own the village funerary shop, and opens with a somewhat chaotic preface in which Li Niannian calls out to the spirit world, asking them to listen as he recounts the night’s bizarre events. On this night of the great somnambulism, the people of the village […]

ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Vanessa Hua

by me

October 20, 2016

Posted on October 20, 2016 (August 10, 2020) by me

Vanessa Hua (whose stories “The Third Daughter” and “River of Stars” appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 91 and No. 98, respectively) is the author of the story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities, named a “searing debut” by O, The Oprah Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, Guernica, and elsewhere, and for nearly two decades she has been writing about Asia and the diaspora, filing stories from China, Burma, South Korea, Panama, Abu Dhabi, and Ecuador. A Visiting Editor in Creative Nonfiction at Saint Mary’s College this fall, she is also a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. Hua spoke to […]

Finding Communion with Characters Half a World Away: Q&A with Jack Livings

by Oscar Villalon

November 20, 2014

Posted on November 20, 2014 (November 19, 2014) by editor

Back in late July, Michiko Kakutani gave a first book of fiction the sort of review authors rarely receive. It was an unqualified rave of Jack Livings’ story collection, The Dog (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; 240 pages). “With ‘The Dog’,” Kakutani concluded, “Mr. Livings has made an incisive—and highly impressive—debut.” One could go even further. With The Dog, and its eight brilliantly told stories set in contemporary China, Jack Livings has delivered one of the best books of 2014—if not the best debut work of fiction by an American writer this year. Much as Ken Kalfus did with Russian society […]

A Poet Survives China’s Prison: Liao Yiwu’s ‘For a Song and a Hundred Songs’

by Charlotte Bhaskar

June 26, 2013

Posted on June 26, 2013 (June 25, 2013) by editor

Violently quashed protests, wrongful imprisonment, book banning, torture—these acts have become almost expected within the context of political rebellion and its suppression. The painful, familiar components of modern repression are given new perspective, however, in Liao Yiwu’s memoir and new book, For A Song And A Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey Through a Chinese Prison (New Harvest Press; 404 pages), translated by Wenguang Huang. In his book, Yiwu, a Chinese poet, tells the story of his time in prison following the Tiananmen Square protests of June 4, 1989. Though not a protestor or even, as he admits, particularly interested “in […]

Tag: China