The Bookworm
Building 4, Nan Sanlitun Road,
Chaoyang District, Beijing
Friday, May 24, 7:30pm
40/50rmb
The Chinese translation of Adam Williams’s novel set in China’s turbulent warlord period of the 1920s, The Emperor’s Bones, hit the number one spot on China’s biggest on-line bookseller, Dang Dang Wang’s New Fiction list. For a foreign novel in translation to become top of the charts in China is rare enough, and this is probably the first time that a foreign historical novel about China itself has achieved it. Controversially, Williams’s Chinese publisher wrote on the cover: “A period of Chinese history that no Chinese writer has ever directly faced, and now it’s been written by a foreign author…”
Is there such a thing as the ownership of a country’s history? What are we fictionalizing in historical fiction? How much do the politics or cultural mores of our own times interpret what happened before? Are there certain topics that are too close for us to see objectively and so need the perspective of an outsider? Novelists Adam Williams, Hong Ying, Chan Koonchung and Jiang Fang Zhou have all tackled China’s history in different ways through their writing. This expert panel looks at how Chinese and foreign novelists approach such a daunting task…
Leave a Comment