Ma Boyong is a prolific and popular fiction writer, essayist, lecturer, Internet commentator, and blogger. His work crosses the boundaries of alternative history, historical fiction, wuxia (martial arts fantasy), fabulism, and more “core” elements of science fiction and fantasy.
Incisive, funny, and erudite, Ma’s works are deeply allusive, featuring surprising and entertaining juxtapositions of traditional elements from Chinese culture and history against contemporary references. The ease with which Ma marshals his encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese history and traditions also makes it a challenge to translate his most interesting works. For example, he has written an imaginative history of coffee in China that applies the conventions of China’s rich millennia-long tea culture to coffee, as well as a wuxia novella featuring Joan of Arc, in which the tropes and expectations of wuxia are mapped to medieval Europe. These stories are extremely entertaining for the reader with the right cultural context, and shed light on the genres and sources Ma plays with, but would be nigh impenetrable for a reader in translation without extensive footnotes.
“The City of Silence,” the selection here, is different from the bulk of Ma’s work. A dystopian tale of extreme censorship, the story won China’s Galaxy (Yinhe) Award in 2005. In its original published form, the story was set in “New York,” and other changes were made to get past the censorship regime. For this translation, Ma and I worked together to restore the text to its original form, but also made additional changes to help the story work better for Anglophone readers.
Given the political background, it may be almost irresistible to read the story as purely a satire of China’s government. I think it’s better to resist that temptation.