The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

China, Tibet, and Taiwan

Mainland China has undergone several radical transformations in little more than a hundred years, from the collapse of its empire through periods of foreign occupation and international isolation to its reemergence as one of the world’s great economic powers. The post-Maoist years have seen what seems like nearly unfettered and still accelerating expansion in many spheres of life there. Rapid urban and economic growth are the most obvious manifestations, but this transformation also extends to film, the fine arts, and literature. For centuries, Chinese fiction has reached English-speaking readers only haphazardly, making it difficult to get much sense of this culture’s rich literary tradition, but suddenly the uneven trickle has become at least a steady flow.

With new trends following in rapid succession, shifting standards of censorship and permissiveness, and a growing and increasingly prominent number of expatriate authors who write in both Chinese and Western languages, the dull and nearly blank slate that was Chinese fiction at the height of the Cultural Revolution has become a huge, variegated canvas. Yet despite this proliferation of recent fiction in translation, the English-speaking world is still in the process of catching up to older Chinese literature.

Classical Fiction

The foremost classical Chinese novels have faced several hurdles in becoming integrated into the body of universally recognized world literature. They do not come from any single era and have little sense of progression. Many are long, with unabridged translations taking up several volumes. The existence of numerous, often heavily edited, translations that appeared throughout the twentieth century and a variety of different English titles for the works—Cao Xueqin’s (ca. 1715–1763) The Story of the Stone (ca. 1760) is also known as the Dream of the Red Chamber, for example—has complicated their reception. Although some of the earlier versions of the classic Chinese novels provided an adequate impression of the originals, it is only relatively recently that even an approximation of novels such as The Story of the Stone—one of the great works of world literature—could be appreciated by English readers (in the translation by David Hawkes and John Minford, 1973–1986). Instead, for much of the twentieth century, populist abridged renderings were all that readers were likely to be exposed to: Arthur Waley’s Monkey (1943), consisting of a few episodes from Journey to the West (1592), and Pearl S. Buck’s version of Outlaws of the Marsh (fourteenth century), All Men Are Brothers (1933), remain the best known. They helped introduce Western audiences to classical Chinese fiction, but they nonetheless were fundamentally different from the originals.

Ironically, it is Pearl Buck’s (1892–1973) The Good Earth (1931) that, in many ways, became the definitive “Chinese” novel of the twentieth century. Buck’s familiarity with China resulted in a depiction that was undeniably authentic but also subjective and limited. Buck may not have been a very good writer, but The Good Earth remains a much-loved (and best-selling) book. Essentially unchallenged for decades as the peremptory choice of representative contemporary Chinese fiction, at least in the United States, its legacy has cast a long shadow. With such a small amount of fiction being written—much less translated—in the early years of the People’s Republic, The Good Earth defined China for generations of readers, and even after an increasing amount of contemporary Chinese fiction started to become available in the 1980s, it still was the trusted keystone. Indeed, as late as 2004, Oprah Winfrey fell back on this rather than select a more recent Chinese novel for her television book club.

Several of the leading Chinese writers of the early twentieth century studied or lived abroad, and some specifically tried to present Chinese culture to Western audiences. The versatile Lin Yutang (1895–1976) even went so far as to write some of his works in English, including Moment in Peking (1938), a historical novel describing China in the first decades of the twentieth century. A better writer, Lau Shaw (Lao She, 1899–1966) lived and taught in London for several years in the 1920s but, unlike Lin, did not write for a Western audience, and his works began to appear in translation only years later. Mindful of American readers’ expectations, his publishers adapted his starkest novel of the struggles of life in China, Rickshaw Boy (1936, English 1945), to foreign tastes. The translation took great liberties, right down to the ending, in which a happy outcome replaced the much darker original. More recent translations, as Rickshaw (1979), Camel Xiangzi (1981), and Rickshaw Boy (2010), are much closer to the original.

The People’s Republic of China Under Mao

After World War II, the separation of China from the West in terms of cultural exchange and dialogue grew more pronounced, and with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, the rift became nearly absolute. Mainland China turned inward and was, in turn, isolated. Without diplomatic relations with the United States until the 1970s or a seat at the United Nations, there was little practical possibility of much literary exchange. But there was not much to miss. Creative literature was valued in the People’s Republic only if it conformed to narrow specifications. Far more quickly and effectively than in the Soviet Union, the Maoist state imposed its ideals and expectations on literary works. This meant that realist fiction—often highly idealized—dominated, focusing on aspects of what was considered the revolutionary struggle, that is, straightforward stories of facing and overcoming hardships, culminating in heroic triumph over the enemy or the elements. Agricultural and military themes dominated this Chinese form of social realism, and even though it was not always crude, most Chinese writing was simplistic and predictable until the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976.

What is most remarkable is how little was published in the People’s Republic at all: while short stories continued to be published in widely read periodicals, an average of only a dozen new novels a year appeared from 1949 through 1976. Other countries in the twentieth century had periods of limited literary production due to war or lack of capacity, but this dearth of new book-length fiction is unequaled in modern times. It began with a radical and apparently largely self-imposed break with the past as the old guard largely abandoned fiction in this new society. Many of the leading novelists from the prewar period who remained in mainland China, including Shen Congwen (1902–1988) and Ba Jin (1904–2005), largely or completely turned away from fiction after 1949. So did Mao Dun (1896–1981), even when he served as China’s minister of culture for some fifteen years. Meanwhile, relatively few of the authors writing in exile during the Maoist period made much of an impression abroad. Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920–1995) is the best and most prominent among them, but even some of her works—commissioned by the United States Information Agency—are too obviously calculatedly anti-Communist.

Aside from the practical difficulties, mutual suspicion and paranoia limited the availability of contemporary mainland Chinese fiction abroad. Any Chinese author who was appreciated abroad was suspect; indeed, one of the few whose works continued to be published in the United States after 1949, Lao She, was murdered by the Red Guard in 1966. Meanwhile, Chinese fiction from the People’s Republic was generally seen by outsiders as little more than propaganda.

As in other Communist countries, foreign-language publishing houses were established to provide material to readers in other nations. Much of this was outright ideological propaganda, but some fiction was translated, and the Chinese Foreign Languages Press and then the Panda Books imprint offered several representative titles of contemporary fiction from the People’s Republic. Most of the titles from the Maoist period are of interest only as historical curiosities, and even as such, they are quickly wearing, with the insistent political correctness of the time crushing most of the creative flourishes. A few works from the tendentious and safely predictable bunch do stand out, including Yang Mo’s (1914–1995) The Song of Youth (1958, English 1964) and some of the works by Hao Ran (1932–2008), but even these have relatively little appeal. Only Taiwanese author Ch’en Jo-hsi (Chen Ruoxi, b. 1938), who moved to China in 1966 and lived there until 1973, offered fiction straight out of the Cultural Revolution. Her collection of stories, The Execution of Mayor Yin (1976, English 1978), could not be printed in mainland China but remains a powerful record of that period.

China After Mao

With the downfall of the Gang of Four came a turning point in the People’s Republic, beginning with a shift in scale: an almost tenfold increase in the average number of novels published annually, to a hundred per year between 1977 and 1986. An accelerating opening to the West also changed foreign attitudes, with 1979 providing a convenient demarcation point both in China and abroad. It is then that Lao She’s most famous novel was published in a new English translation, as Rickshaw, and this one was true to the original, dark end and all. This was also the year when Ch’ien Chung-shu’s (Qian Zhongshu, 1910–1998) Fortress Besieged (1947, English 1979) appeared in translation. This portrait of East and West is set in the prewar years, but its broad, packed satire offers a smart, insightful overview of the cultural confluences in 1930s China. Though conditions differ greatly in contemporary China, Fortress Besieged remains fresh and has enough basic similarities in the continuing tug between old and new, as well as the domestic and foreign influences that Qian describes, for it to be a pertinent as well as an enjoyable read.

The revised Rickshaw and Fortress Besieged, both set in pre-Communist times, along with the first volumes of the definitive editions of some of the classic Chinese novels, helped pave the way for English-speaking readers’ greater understanding of Chinese fiction. Fiction written by authors working in the People’s Republic was slower to gain ground, but by the late 1970s and early 1980s, a profound shift in what was tolerated by the state resulted in writing that was far more palatable to Western audiences.

Wang Meng (b. 1934) is the most interesting figure from the first wave of post-Maoist liberalization that ended with the Tiananmen Square massacre. After some early success as a writer, his story A Young Man Arrives at the Organization Department (1956, English 1981) was heavily criticized, and he endured nearly two decades of internal exile and was able to return permanently to Beijing only in 1979. In 1986, he was named minister of culture, only to be ousted in 1989. His novella Bolshevik Salute (1979, English 1989) is a milestone, and Wang’s stream-of-consciousness experiments and modernist approach mark a radical change from a tradition in which unity was expected and narratives unfolded simply and chronologically. Wang’s fictional reckonings with party loyalty and commitment and the personal and introspective focus found in Bolshevik Salute and in works such as The Butterfly (1980, English 1983) offer a critical examination of recent Chinese history unthinkable even a few years earlier. Yet Wang’s break with the past is far from absolute. He remains very much grounded in the ideology and slogans of the Maoist era, with even the protagonists’ soul-searching reflecting the self-critical thought that was expected and demanded during that time.

In comparison to the self-absorbed Japanese I-novel or many of the first-person narratives found in modern Western literature, Chinese fiction of the 1980s, which still balanced that long-inculcated concern for the greater good with individual desires and needs, hardly seems self-indulgent. Nevertheless, many of these works have a sense of transgression in showing greater concern for the individual. This creates a heightened tension that gives these works a sense of otherness and casts the universal concerns and feelings in a different light, being situated in a world that had so long insisted on different assumptions. Love, in particular, had had only a limited place in Chinese fiction but now came to the fore. Zhang Jie’s (b. 1937) Love Must Not Be Forgotten (1980, English 1986) has an indicative title, and though not as sentimental as the title suggests, this story collection represents some of the new directions Chinese writers were taking at this time. More interesting is Zhang’s Leaden Wings (1981, English 1987, and as Heavy Wings, 1989), which combines a focus on the individual and romance as a part of self-fulfillment with the familiar industrial and bureaucratic settings, an opposition that fueled the controversy surrounding the novel. Zhang Xinxin’s (b. 1953) The Dreams of Our Generation (1982, English 1986) is another novel of the period that explores the role of women and of love that stands out. Ran Chen’s (b. 1962) personal and deeply introspective A Private Life (1996, English 2004) is a transitional work from after 1989 and before a sex-drenched pop mentality came to dominate the scene.

Wang Anyi (b. 1954) is an author with a particularly broad range, which comes across in even the few of her works available in translation. In her early realist writing, such as Lapse of Time (1982, English 1988) and Baotown (1984, English 1989), she concentrates on small-town and country life and the lives of women in particular. Her much larger work, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1995, English 2008), is the story of a strong female figure, this time against a backdrop of four decades of history in Shanghai, from the years just before the People’s Republic was founded to the 1980s.

Decade-spanning, panoramic novels that cover large stretches of recent Chinese history have appeared in large numbers, and many make for satisfying reading as comprehensive one-volume overviews of the tumultuous changes the country has undergone. Whereas The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is very much driven by personality, a novel like Zhang Wei’s (b. 1956) The Ancient Ship (1987, English 2008), which describes more or less the same span of history, uses many more strands in weaving its broad tapestry. It is set in the fictional noodle-producing city of Wali, a locale very different from Shanghai, with its days of glory and strategic importance long gone. Several of Yu Hua’s (b. 1960) novels are similarly far-reaching: To Live (1993, English 2003) offers a much quicker tour of the decades, its protagonist beginning as a ne’er-do-well whose transformations bring only limited redemption, while Cries in the Drizzle (1991, English 2007) uses the Cultural Revolution as a starting point. The massive Brothers (2005–2006, English 2009) is the most elaborate of his fictions, chronicling the story of two (step)brothers, who, despite their differences, maintain their bond in rapidly modernizing China. The violent, sex-filled narrative provides some insight into recent changes in Chinese society, but by the standards of Western fiction, it is far from straightforward in how the story unfolds.

Among other works of fiction covering a narrower historical time frame, Bai Hua’s (b. 1956) The Remote Country of Women (1988, English 1995), with its two-track narrative and use of the matrilineal Mosuo ethnic group, is an interesting take on the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, the eminent author Jia Pingwa’s (b. 1952) Turbulence (1987, English 1991), a weighty rural epic of the 1980s, describes a time of uncertainty when corruption is rife and the locals, deprived of the prop of Maoist absolutism, mix old and new superstitions and beliefs. The novel has appeal, but, like too many Chinese novels in translation, both the prose and the plot have a rough feel.

Among Chinese authors working on the mainland, Mo Yan (b. 1955)—a pen name meaning “don’t speak”—was already one of the best-known Chinese writers abroad even before he was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize. His novels are ambitious and expansive, as he “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary” (as the Nobel commendation expressed it). The creative reach of his work fulfills many of the expectations of contemporary international fiction. He uses and defies conventions in a variety of colorful versions of China, grounding several of his novels in the same locale (Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong) and featuring a character named Mo Yan but also constantly spinning out his stories in new ways. Widely translated even before he received the Nobel Prize, all the English versions of his work were translated by Howard Goldblatt, giving them a welcome consistency.

Beginning with Red Sorghum (1986, English 1993), Mo Yan has worked on a grand scale, culminating in the most all-encompassing of his novels, Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996, English 2005), a reworking (and summing up) of Chinese history in the twentieth century and a monumental work even its abridged English version. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006, English 2008) leads yet another protagonist through recent Chinese history, this time in several animal reincarnations. Sandalwood Death (2001, English 2013) is a more naturalistic novel set in Gaomi around the turn of the nineteenth century. A panoramic historical novel, it also describes German colonial activity in the China of that time, specifically the disruptive construction of the Qingdao–Jinan Railway. Mo Yan’s fiction contains much violence and bloody excess. Among the most entertaining of his works is the more tempered, consumption-focused novel The Republic of Wine (1992, English 2000), in which he artfully combines the particularly Chinese obsession with food (and alcohol) with sly social and political criticism.

Unlike Mo Yan, Su Tong (b. 1963) situates his vivid and brutal fictions largely in the past. The three novellas in the collection Raise the Red Lantern (1990, English 1993) are set in the 1930s, and Rice (1991, English 1995) and My Life as Emperor (1992, English 2005) are also, at least nominally, historical. Setting supplies some of the atmosphere, but Su revels in keen description and storytelling, which produces a jarring effect, given the bleak worlds he presents.

While the realistic and epic are dominant in recent Chinese fiction, some experimental fiction also has been translated. Yu Hua’s earliest prose, including the stories collected in The Past and the Punishment (English 1996), was considered avant-garde, and by comparison, his better-known later novels are much more restrained and realistic. Tibetan-Chinese author Zhaxi Dawa (Tashi Dawa, b. 1959) is one of the authors who has most emphatically embraced magical realism, as in his collection A Soul in Bondage (English 1992), and the familiar feel this gives his creative stories, coupled with their exotic local color, makes his work attractive to Western audiences. The leading avantgarde author, and one well represented in translation, is the challenging Can Xue (b. 1953). Her work clearly stands apart from most of the available Chinese fiction and, with its detailed focus on the individual, frequently veers into the surreal and feels closer to Western literary traditions. A different and more approachable form of literary experimentation is found in the works of Han Shaogong (b. 1953), first in his collection Homecoming? (1985, English 1992) but then especially in A Dictionary of Maqiao (1996, English 2003), a novel presented in the form of dictionary entries. This record is made by a lexicographercum-narrator sent to a remote region in the south of China for reeducation during the Cultural Revolution. As Bai Hua did with the Mosuo in The Remote Country of Women, Han uses an ethnic group distinct from the Han Chinese majority to good effect, but his is also a novel about language itself. Despite what is inevitably lost in translation, A Dictionary of Maqiao is one of the most impressive contemporary Chinese works available in English, the multilayered text engaging on all its different levels, from its commentary on the policies of the Cultural Revolution to the eye-opening use of language.

Zhu Wen’s (b. 1967) collection of stories I Love Dollars (English 2007) describes China in the 1990s when commercialism has moved to the fore. The extremes of this embrace of Western consumerism, coupled with the newfound sexual freedom, can be found in the novels of a number of young women writers, such as Wei Hui’s (b. 1973) Shanghai Baby (1999, English 2002) and Mian Mian’s (b. 1970) Candy (1999, English 2003). These are novels of the new international cosmopolitanism, with the great Chinese urban centers now like any other city in the world, right down to the racy chick lit that exposes the (relatively) wild ways of a new generation. Unsurprisingly, Wei’s protagonist has a trendy Western name like Nikki—and is known as Coco—and much of the sequel to Shanghai Baby, entitled Marrying Buddha (2005, English 2005), takes place in New York. While they are of dubious literary value, these works do at least suggest some of the changes Chinese society has undergone.

Engagement with the past continues as well. Yan Lianke’s (b. 1958) winning satire, Serve the People! (2005, English 2007), set in the Cultural Revolution, is occasionally crude but describes an isolated corner of that time much more benignly than might be expected. Yan, however, also goes about smashing the Maoist idol enthusiastically (and literally) in a way that even now must seem shocking in China. Yan’s Lenin’s Kisses (2004, English 2012) features the isolated village of Liven, which is almost entirely populated by the disabled. The novel pits local leader Grandma Mao Zhi, who wants the town to be able to “withdraw from society” and the control of regional authorities, and one of those regional leaders, Chief Liu, who has the harebrained idea of buying Lenin’s embalmed corpse and building a new mausoleum near Liven, creating what he believes will be an incredible tourist attraction. The inspired, multilayered satire is amusing and revealing, but Lenin’s Kisses is unwieldy in size and scope—in contrast to the more pointed Serve the People! Another of Yan’s novels, Dream of Ding Village (2006, English 2011), is partly based on a blood-selling scandal in China from the 1990s. In this work of grim humor, Yan describes a provincial town shattered after the establishment of a blood-plasma collection enterprise there leads to many of the locals becoming infected by HIV and dying of AIDS.

• Wang in Love and Bondage (English 2007), a collection of three short novellas, is the only fiction by Wang Xiaobo (1952–1997) that has been translated, but the vigorous style of these creative works suggests an author who should live up to the high reputation that has preceded him.

• Wang Shuo’s (b. 1958) cartoonish Please Don’t Call Me Human (1989, English 2000) and Playing for Thrills (1989, English 1998) are too broad in their satire to be entirely satisfying, but for a dizzying spin across large swaths of urban Chinese society, they offer a great deal of material.

• Mai Jia’s (b. 1964) Decoded (2002, English 2014), the first of this very popular author’s works available in English, is presented as a documentary account of a mathematical genius enlisted by the state to work in cryptography. Though unpolished, this narrative offers a fascinating picture of intellectual life in Maoist China.

Jiang Rong’s (b. 1946) epic Wolf Totem (2004, English 2008) is an astonishingly comprehensive indictment that also largely takes place during the Cultural Revolution. In idealizing the nomadic herdsmen of Inner Mongolia—and the wolf—the novel condemns both the Han Chinese national character and the Communist system. This prescriptive allegory is a difficult and largely unsatisfying read, of interest far more for what its immense popularity says about contemporary China than its literary qualities.

Expatriate Authors

The most pronounced effect of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 and the subsequent government crackdown on Chinese literature was the consolidation of an expatriate establishment. The year 1989 and its aftermath led to a number of authors leaving China, as well as confirming the decision to stay abroad for others, including the 2000 Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian (b. 1940).

In his novella Stick Out Your Tongue (1987, English 2006), Ma Jian (b. 1953) presents simple everyday scenes that are realistic depictions of Tibetan life; considered defamatory, the book was sufficient to make him an author non grata. Now long settled in London, he continues to write in Chinese, and his novels The Noodle Maker (1990, English 2004) and Beijing Coma (English 2008) remain centered on the mainland. Beijing Coma, in which Ma describes both the changing China of the 1990s and the bitter past for a protagonist who has been in a coma since being shot in Tiananmen Square, is one of the major novels of the post1989 period. Painstakingly detailed, the long novel may, however, seem bloated.

Other authors who have settled in England and the United States have made the transition from writing in Chinese to writing in English. Geling Yan (b. 1959) published several novels in China before emigrating, and her novel The Banquet Bug (2006) is the first she wrote in English. Its entertainingly spun-out premise of an unemployed worker posing as a journalist to sneak into fancy and elaborate official banquets allows her, like Mo Yan in The Republic of Wine, to cleverly mix the Chinese obsession with food with a story of corruption. In an effective twist, Xiaolu Guo (b. 1973) made the transition of going from one language to another the basis of the first novel she wrote in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). That novel focuses on émigré life, but her Village of Stone (2003, English 2004) and 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (2008), an English adaptation of her first novel, which she had originally written in Chinese, revolve around Chinese conditions.

Both Ha Jin (b. 1956) and Yiyun Li (b. 1972) write in English and have become critical favorites in the United States. A number of French-writing Chinese authors have achieved considerable international success, including Dai Sijie (b. 1954), whose works seem most attuned to the Western reader. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (French 2000, English 2001) is one of the most approachable tales of the Cultural Revolution, and its lessons about the power of literature offer a pleasing affirmation of Western ideals. Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch (French 2003, English 2005) is a quixotic comedy of psychoanalysis illustrating how even in modern times East and West still are separated. In her novels, including the somewhat rushed The Girl Who Played Go (French 2001, English 2003) and Empress (French 2003, English 2006), the much younger Shan Sa (b. 1972) prefers to look back to earlier times.

Although Gao Xingjian is a well-known dramatist, his two major works of prose, the novels Soul Mountain (1989, English 1999) and One Man’s Bible (1999, English 2002), are intricate and deeply personal quest novels. In both works, Gao experiments with a variety of formal approaches (and narrators) in his philosophical-literary explorations. As such, the works differ from the generally realist fiction that makes up the bulk of Chinese fiction available in translation and, despite their occasional difficulties, are worth reading.

• Hong Ying (b. 1962) spent more than a decade living abroad, starting in 1991, but also continued to write in Chinese. Her novels were controversial for their explicitness in the People’s Republic but agreeably sexy by mainstream Western standards.

TIBET AND ELSEWHERE

A significant amount of the Chinese fiction available in translation uses locales and characters outside the traditional Han Chinese heartland. In part, this is a reflection of the experiences of their authors, who were sent to these remote areas during the Cultural Revolution. These experiences range from Wang Meng’s long internal exile among the Uighurs to Jiang Rong’s familiarity with Inner Mongolia. Authors have also found these isolated pockets of different cultures useful as cover in criticizing that dominant state. Tibet, the most prominent autonomous region in the People’s Republic, holds a special place, especially as Chinese primacy over the territory (and culture) is often questioned abroad. The fate of Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue, with its depiction of the area and its people that departs from the official line, suggests that fiction dealing with Tibetan issues is subject to closer government scrutiny. Thus Xinran (b. 1958) did not finish writing Sky Burial (English 2004), which describes life in Tibet in more recent times, until she was established in London. Nevertheless, some works are coming from the mainland about Tibet, like Zhaxi Dawa’s stories and Alai’s (b. 1959) Red Poppies (1998, English 2002), set during the time shortly before the Communist takeover of China, that are of some interest. Coming from a completely different angle, the India-based Tibetan activist Jamyang Norbu (b. 1949) creatively re-created Sherlock Holmes’s missing years (spent in Tibet, according to Arthur Conan Doyle) in The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (published in the United States as Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years; 1999). Here, Holmes protects the young thirteenth Dalai Lama as Jamyang mixes fact and fiction in a pastiche that also transposes elements from Rudyard Kipling’s (1865–1936) Kim (1901).

Even during the Maoist years, the mainland has remained the focus of foreign literary attention. Although a largely independent literary culture has developed in the Republic of China (Taiwan), it has received considerably less attention in the English-speaking world.

Li Qiao’s (b. 1934) trilogy Wintry Night (1975–1980, English 2001) is incompletely translated but is an evocative epic covering roughly five decades in the lives of several generations of Hakka settlers in Taiwan through the end of the Japanese occupation of the island. Several works describe the history and post-1949 evolution of Taiwan. Tung Nien’s (Dong Nian, b. 1950) Setting Out (1993, English 1998), presented in vignettes from a child’s perspective, creates an interesting vantage point to look at the Taiwan of the 1960s, while Pai Hsien-yung’s (Bai Xianyong, b. 1937) collections Taipei People (1971, English 2000) and Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream (1968, English 1982) present much larger casts of characters. The two parts of Chang Ta-Chun’s (Zhang Dachun, b. 1957) trilogy published in English as Wild Kids (1993–1996, English 2000) explore growing up in more recent times, including the attraction of Taiwan’s darker underside.

Chu Tien-wen’s (Zhu Tianwen, b. 1956) Notes of a Desolate Man (1994, English 1999) and Pai’s Crystal Boys (1983, English 1990) are among a number of Taiwanese works depicting homosexuality, a subject that mainland Chinese authors have been much more reluctant—and, because of disapprobation by the authorities, less able—to address.

Wang Wen-Hsing (Wang Wenxing, b. 1939) is one of Taiwan’s leading authors. His Backed Against the Sea (1981, English 1993) shows some of the originality that, until recently, seems to have flourished more in Taiwan than on the mainland. The novel consists of a confessional rant by a down-on-his-luck narrator who is on the run and hiding in the Taiwanese boondocks. Both angry and funny, Backed Against the Sea is also stylistically innovative in trying to convey all this pent-up anger and frustration. The more approachable Family Catastrophe (1972, English 1995) also creatively presents a dark story, with the disappearance of the father of the protagonist, Fan Yeh, being the final piece of the long decline and collapse of this family.

• Li Ang’s (b. 1952) The Butcher’s Wife (1983, English 1986) and Li Yung-p’ing’s (Li Yongping, b. 1947) Retribution (1986, English 2003) are brutal works in which the main characters are driven to murder.

• Wang Chen-ho’s (Wang Zhenhe, 1940–1990) Rose, Rose, I Love You (1984, English 1998) is a rare example of a humorous Chinese novel. The comic relief in its depiction of how the locals prepare for the visit of American GIs is an amusing and insightful view of misconceived East–West cultural expectations.

Chinese Genre Fiction

Lighter and more popular Chinese fare has recently appeared in translation, but much of it covers old ground. As in most totalitarian states, the People’s Republic had no tradition of mystery and detective fiction, and until recently, only a few novels that could be described as crime fiction, such as Wang Shuo’s Playing for Thrills, have appeared in translation. For now, almost all the mysteries available in English are those written by foreigners or emigrants, with Qiu Xiaolong’s (b. 1953) Chen Cao series and Diane Wei Liang’s (b. 1966) Mei Wang series being the most notable examples. Science fiction fares even worse, with Taiwanese author Chang Hsi-Kuo’s (Zhang Xiguo, b. 1944) ambitious The City Trilogy (1984–1991, English 2003) and Cixin Liu’s (b. 1963) trilogy that begins with The Three-Body Problem (2006, English 2014) among the few examples that are of any interest.

One very popular Chinese literary genre that has received limited attention abroad is wuxia, martial arts fiction. Fortunately, several works by the master of the genre, Hong Kong author Louis Cha (Jin Yong, b. 1924), are available in English, including the early The Book and the Sword (1956, English 2004) and the culmination of his work, the three-volume The Deer and the Cauldron (1972, English 1997–2003). Whereas much recent Chinese fiction leans heavily on Western literature and its traditions, Cha’s adventure novels are much closer in spirit and style to some of the popular classic Chinese epics. Cha’s books are superior historical entertainment and a welcome escapist alternative.