I arrogantly recommend… is a monthly column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.”
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RECOMMENDED READING FOR THE YEAR OF THE SNAKE
The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature
Oxford University Press
The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature is a new publishing endeavor formed along the lines of the Loeb Classical Library of Greek and Roman literature as well as more recent projects such as the Library of Arabic Literature and the Murty Classical Library of India: Bringing to the English-speaking world dual-language versions of broad and long-lasting literary traditions. Focusing not just on Western traditions of what constitutes literature—which lend themselves to “greatest hits” anthologies such as those produced by Norton—but also on spheres of influence having little to do with current national boundaries—let alone notions of “nationalism”—or political ideologies.
Funding for this new series of Chinese literature is a gift from Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang aimed at creating a literary canon shaped from “a broad, humanistic definition of the literary, in the spirit of East Asia’s traditional world of letters: ranging from philosophical, historiographical, and religious writings to poetry, drama, and the broad spectrum of narrative, historical, or fictional writings, and extending to knowledge fields less commonly thought of as literary, such as medicine, music, cosmology, and more,” [1] works written between 1046 BCE and 1911 CE—a nice 3,000-year slice of history.
Part of what lead to 1911 as the cut-off point for the series is the founders’ sense that Chinese as the language of Eastern influence, education, and sophistication ended around that time, a time when Japanese and Korean languages began asserting their independence from several millennia of Sino-dominance. This means that works finding their way into the The Hsu-Tang Library may have as their geographic origin Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, etc.
Another factor providing impetus for the library is the fact that it allows co-founder Agnes Hsu-Tang to continue a project begun 250 years ago by a maternal ancestor, Ji Yun (1724–1805), who edited The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, which comprised (according to a Chinese source on Wikipedia) “36,381 volumes, 79,337 manuscript rolls, 2.3 million pages, and about 997 million words.” With a publishing history like that, it’s no surprise that something like 250 years might have to pass before somebody took up the gauntlet again. The books in this series are lightly and unobtrusively footnoted and gracefully translated into idiomatic, natural-sounding English.
To illustrate the broad range of concerns found under the umbrella of “Chinese literature,” the first five volumes in The Hsu-Tang Library are not canonical in the way such classics as Journey to the West might be thought, while at the same time they address modern concerns—women’s voices, the place of humor in Chinese literature, territories of contentious autonomy (such as Tibet and Xinjiang), and so forth. I’ve ordered my reviews chronologically according to the works’ original time of writing and/or publication. The volumes concern Daoism, humor, travel (and more Daoism), poetry by Buddhist nuns, and an emperor’s visit to a bordello (with Buddhist overtones).
[1] Denecke, Wiebke and Lucas Klein, Launching the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature on the 250th Anniversary of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, The Journal of Asian Studies 82:2, May 2023
Master Incapable: A Medieval Daoist on the Liberation of the Mind
Jan De Meyer (translator)
Written in 887, this late-period Tang-dynasty work expresses Daoist principles, the basis for which are the writings of Laozi (Lao-tse), who flourished roughly during the time Ancient Greeks were composing the philosophy and plays that still influence Western culture (circa 500 BCE). Only around 200 CE did Daoism evolve into a practice for all members of society, putting it in competition with Buddhism and Confucianism. The anarchist tendencies of Master Incapable’s Daoism are expressed as anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical ideals, for it is humanity’s decision to accept authority and hierarchy (based on arbitrary criteria) that pulled humanity from its natural tendencies (i.e., acting spontaneously, without intention) in which it lived in harmony with the rest of nature. As translator Jan De Meyer notes,
Different from the Buddhist notion of Emptiness, the Daoist void does not indicate the fundamentally illusory nature of all phenomena but rather an unlimited potentiality. . . He who embodies the Void maintains a maximum of potential and is therefore able to make his own naturalness manifest itself.
Master Incapable is divided into three books, each taking a slightly different approach to illustrating Daoist principles. Book I shows that “naturalness” and “spontaneity” are similar qualities that manifest what is truest about a person. That is, what we do without thinking about it is evidence, for Daoists, of living right:
Birds fly in the air and fish swim in the deep, not through some special technique, but rather through what-is-so-of-itself [spontaneity]. Therefore, a bird or a fish has no self-knowledge of the ability to fly or swim. If birds and fish did have this knowledge, and if they were to set their minds on performing these actions, then they would certainly fall down. . . This also applies to people. . . For this reason, he who relies on spontaneity will last, and he who obtains constancy will be saved.
Hierarchy imbalances that which is natural. Purposively “doing good” in one case may bring out bad fortune in another case—even in some cases where acting to save a life seems to be the right thing to do. The intention behind the act creates or sustains the imbalance.
Book II consists of anecdotes and parables meant to illustrate the faults in living with intention—as Confucius and his disciples would have us do—compared to the virtues in living without intention. Purposeful goals create a mindset limited in outlook and easily frustrated when haphazard events trump planned actions. (Man proposes but God disposes, as Proverbs would have it.)
Book III finds Master Improbable answering questions regarding the proper demeanor to take in life. For instance, in one anecdote, Master Improbable is approached by a man who complains that, while awake, his days are filled with misery, and only at night, when he is dreaming, does he find contentment. Master Improbable’s answer is that the man has arrived at perfect balance in life, since the pleasure and pains, of equal intensity, cancel each other out.
Because notions of good and bad fortune have nothing to do naturalness and spontaneity, those Daoist principles that encourage us to see intervention as behavior to avoid, Master Incapable’s arguments may strike Western readers (this Western reader, at least) as alien. But given the horrors that have been committed (sometimes willfully, sometimes accidentally) against humanity and nature in the name of acting in the name of goodness, Daoism offers a medicine that may be hard to swallow, while directing us away from desires for material accumulation and public acclaim.
The Misadventures of Master Mugwort: A Joke Book Trilogy from Imperial China
Su Shi, Lu Cai, Tu Benjun / Elizabeth Smithrosser
The Misadventures of Master Mugwort takes place during the Warring States Period (481-481 BCE) but was not written until the late 11th century by Su Shi then added to by Lu Cai during the early 16th century, with a third part added by Tu Benjun nearly a century later in the early 17th century. Elizabeth Smithrosser, who translated the three works gathered here and writes the book’s introduction, notes that a more accurate appellation for the phrase “Warring States” would be “contending states,” since this period of eastern Chinese history was one of flux in terms of power and dynasties, with some states arising and disappearing. During the period of contention, the leaders of the various vying states developed a reliance on advisors to the court whose suggestions often helped determine each state’s success—at least in lasting yet another year. Effective advisors were also accomplished rhetoricians, since their advice had to be couched in convincing terms. Some advisors worked for decades with the same leader; others only advised a particular leader for a few years before seeking out better remuneration elsewhere. Because of their wisdom and skills of persuasion, the advisors attracted disciples who recorded their sayings into books of the masters, some books of which are still studied today. The Misadventures of Master Mugwort (which could also be translated as Master Fool) is a parody of such Masters classics. (59/xliii + 16/163)
The anecdotes—usually a few paragraphs to a page long—concern quotidian events that also serve as moral demonstrations of poor political decisions when extrapolated to bigger issues. Thus for instance, in the first anecdote, Master Mugwort complains to King Qi that his son is ill. The king offers Mugwort medicine that recently cured him, King Qi, of an illness. Soon after Mugwort medicates his son, the boy dies. Mugwort complains to the king, If “[o]nly that . . . ‘excellent medicine’ of yours had been the right prescription!” Moral: Beware of “one size fits all” solutions to political problems. The other anecdotes reflect on leaders with behaviors that are short-sighted, selfish, foolish, or otherwise counter to wise rule.
Anecdotes are prefaced by paragraphs explaining the background to what will follow, and are ended by paragraphs explaining the significance of Master Mugwort’s commentary.
The second of the three works that make up the Mugwort collection was written several centuries after the initial volume. “Further Sayings of Master Mugwort,” by Lu Cai, are longer than those by Su Shi—usually a page long—funnier but less incisive regarding matters of state. Lu Cai’s parables of Master Mugwort are written more with raising smiles than consciousness, with an attitude of presenting them as thought experiments in the mode of stereotyped Mugwort behavior. “Can you see somebody like X doing Y?” Lu maintains the humorous tone by dispensing with moralizing ends to the anecdotes. We get the human foolishness head-on without commentary on how we should feel about it. Lu Cai probably assumed his audience was educated well enough to know what conclusions to draw without reference to a highlighter.
The third collection, “Outer Sayings of Master Mugwort” by Tu Benjun, is similar to the second collection in that the sayings are devoted more to humorous anecdotes than to commenting on proper ways to rule. Anecdotes related to lies and state-level corruption concern most of the Outer Sayings.
Daoist Master Changchun’s Journey to the West: To the Court of Chinggis Qan and Back
Li Zhichang / Ruth Dunnell, Stephen West, and Shao-yun Yang
Written in the early 13th century, Daoist Master Changchun’s Journey to the West concerns a monk’s trip to central Asia, across Northern Asia, above the Gobi Desert to Xinjiang territory, in the middle of the continent, for a command audience with Chinggis Qan (aka Genghis Khan), and his way back, taking a southern route. Part of the travelogue includes thoughts on evolving religious stances and understandings based on Master Changchun’s encounters with increasingly foreign ways the further west he travels.
The narration begins in 1219 during the Jurchen Jin dynasty, which was subdued by the Mongols led by Chinggis Qan. According to the book’s introduction, “the rise of the Mongol empire and its expansion outward frame the larger context for the Daoists’ journey.” Qiu Chuji was a prominent Daoist who Chinggis Qan invited to join him as an advisor. (Mongols had their own religion but employed the services of other religious leaders to say prayers to God to assure the Qan’s continued status as divinely ordained.) Shortly before Chinggis Qan issued that request, a classical scholar named Li Zhichang had joined Qui’s entourage, eventually authoring this “Journey to the West” because of his literary skills.
The book mostly consists of describing the lands the group passes—desert sands, sere grass, treeless plains, mountain ranges, cold weather. The villages and religious retreats / palaces they stay at aren’t described, nor are their daily habits when they stay for prolonged periods at one of these places (usually due to poor weather). Instead, Changchun improvises poetry for certain occasions—the date of a prescribed religious ritual, the completion of a gallery of holy statues, on leaving the town, when a forwarding address needs to be provided for others trying to follow him on his path to Chinggis Qan. (Sometimes he receives requests to be visited; other times he receives letters from Chinggis Qan inquiring about the state of Changchun progress in reaching him across deserts and mountain ranges.
Descriptions of cold, arid conditions, people who live in yurts, etcetera. Little happens: camels move the caravan, locals are met, camps established, prayers are said by the Master, and then the caravan moves on again.
The caravan finally makes it past various mountain ranges and deserts to Xinjiang territory, home to the Uyghurs who, at this point in history, have already converted to Islam from Buddhism. One of the elderly monks who has been part of the caravan dies from exhaustion—the harsh, cold weather no doubt finally caught up with him. But his death also highlights the potential danger to Master Changchun, who is also old when he receives Chinggis Qan’s request for his appearance. Even the best travel accommodations an emperor can offer a great monk are no match for nature’s normal, fluxing course.
An Anthology of Poetry by Buddhist Nuns of Late Imperial China
Beata Grant, translator
Most poems in this anthology, written between 1368-1911, are translated into English for the first time. Most are by Chan Buddhists (known in the West from its Japanese equivalent, Zen Buddhism). Because published poetry by Chinese women in general has been rarer than that by male poets, little biographical information exists for many of them. Given that Chinese society has been led according to Confucian principles for the past 2,500 years, traditional roles for women have been seen as secondary to roles led by men. Thus, the women who turned to Buddhist temples to devote their lives to religion were the destitute (poor and destitute nuns were the minority), widows from both poor and wealthy families, those who lost their families and/or their means of income, and those unable to start a family or unwilling to marry. Some learned the conventions of Buddhist poetry while in a convent, others—usually women from what today we would call middle class and upper middle-class homes—were already educated in writing and painting, and may have been well-connected and esteemed in their social set, too.
Each poet is introduced with a one-paragraph biography, and the poems are lightly footnoted to clarify the significance of the imagery, much of which alludes to other poems and tenets in the Buddhist canon. The poems stand on their own as well-wrought—and well-translated by Beata Grant—, and the footnotes add depth to the readings. Although the poetry by its Buddhist nature is didactic, the lessons are conveyed implicitly rather than explicitly, so that studying the poems opens them outward toward understanding—one’s understanding of them then become as personal revelations arrived at by one’s journey through the Buddhist iconography rather than as moral phrases merely memorized.
The Anthology of Poetry by Buddhist Nuns of Late Imperial China has representations from a wide range of poetic styles, all following strict aesthetic rules. Not all these rules can be translated because Mandarin is a tonal language (there are five tones), meaning any given syllable has multiple possible meanings, depending on the tone used to pronounce it and the other syllables surrounding it that form its context. The poetry is not based on rhythm or rhyme but instead syllable and line counts (plus matching tones in parallel, syllable by syllable, line by line). Many Buddhist poetic forms in the anthology consist of set numbers of syllables across and lines down, such as 7 syllables across and line 8 down, forming a tight rectangle on the page. The terseness of the Mandarin originals is demonstrated visually by the translations, which require two lines to express in English for every one line in Chinese.
Of the dozens of fine poems and their translations, I arbitrarily choose these two, by Deyue and Ziyong Chengru, respectively. Deyue’s On an Autumn Night, Listing to the Crickets:
The sound of crickets chirping away
is the one that most stirs the heart.
An autumn moon that has no bounds
Shines on the patterned screen.
The silver candle burns on high;
the sand clock drips without end.
When I can no longer bear to listen,
I decide to pen a verse.
From Asking Questions of the Masters: Four G?th?s by Ziyong Chengru (a g?th? is a type of song):
Such a long distance along the Yangzi
in a leaf of a boat,
Enduring the wind and the waves,
I find my goals are hard to meet!
Who knows where the rivers end
and the mountains stop.
Where can we meet face-to-face
and discuss growing old?
The poems in this anthology can be enjoyed for their nature imagery as much as for their expression of Buddhist theology.
The Emperor of China in a House of Ill Repute: Songs of the Imperial Visit to Datong
Pu Songling / Wilt L. Idema
This prosimetric work (combining prose fiction and poetry) purports to take place during the early 1500s when an emperor sneaks away from his palace to attend a bordello (all of which, at the time, were controlled by the government). Disguising himself as a soldier, he takes up with a courtesan known as Buddha’s Lust, who has secretly longed to marry the emperor. Over time, she comes to realize that this “soldier” is in fact the emperor, and the emperor, having become charmed by Buddha’s Lust, takes her back with him to Beijing, avenging himself on the way back on everyone who treated him poorly while he was disguised. (Pu wrote the book in the late 1600s, nearly two centuries after the putative action occurs.)
After many months of arduous travel, the troupe finally arrives at Chinggis Qan’s camp. Master Changchun and Chinggis Qan meet; Chinggis thanking Changchun for making the trip. Because instruction in the Way cannot properly start until a propitious date can be determined, the Qan explains that he must first eliminate some Uyghur bandits, which will take a few months. The two masters agree to meet again in four months’ time, which presumably is the time covered by Book 2.
Once Master Changchun and Chinggis Qan meet and agree on the conditions under which Changchun will transmit the Dao to Chinggis, they hold four or five sessions which were recorded but never made part of Li Zhichang’s travelogue. Thus, their meeting comes as an anti-climax to the three-year journey made by Changchun and his entourage from and to his home. Changchun’s entourage take a different route home—a trek that is still arduous but is one in which they meet more Daoists than on their way to Xinjiang. Changchun is depicted as tired and ill during part of the return trip, and his entourage is often swamped with requests for the Master to address the local congregation, which Changchun must turn down.
Buddha’s Lust is about to realize that the “common soldier” who specifically ordered her services is in fact the emperor, to whom she always felt was fated to unite with and had been saving herself for. The emperor, we see, has a keen sense of intuition (surely, a key attribute of a great leader), an ability to sense his subjects’ purity and loyalty: no other prostitute can fool him into believing she is Buddha’s Lust, even though he’s never seen her before. The emperor acts like a fool to test Buddha’s Lust. While Buddha’s Lust’s patience is tried, she never acts improperly—she is spiritually incapable, such is her karmic purity.
The emperor and Buddha’s Lust begin flirting with each other. Buddha’s Lust doesn’t yet know that she is with the emperor, but she is impressed enough by his knowledge and talent (playing the lute and singing) to assume that, while he may not be the common soldier he is dressed as, he must be of high rank. Wang Long—a government official who is full of himself, who also frequents the bordello the emperor and Buddha’s Lust are in, and who was rejected by Buddha’s Lust because she claimed to be waiting for the emperor—hears the emperor singing and playing the lute and is intrigued to find out more about who this stranger might be. The emperor’s playing far surpasses the talents of everyone else he’s heard performing at the bordello, and he suspects that the performer cannot be just a common soldier. Wang Long and Guanyin’s Equal (aka Big Sister), the whore he is lounging with, invite Buddha’s Lust and the emperor to their suite to engage in a drinking game. Wang Long and Big Sister lose the game, of course, and feel much embarrassed and enraged for having lost. The true nature of their opponent, however, is lost on them. The emperor uses the opportunity of the challenge to take his measure of the man (one of his government’s top officials) and finds him disappointingly wanting. We know a bad fate is in store for Wang, a knowledge worsened by his promise to the emperor that if he, Wang, is sufficiently impressed by the stranger’s talents, Wang will give him a shirt made of human skin.
Buddha’s Lust, even without definitive proof, realizes that the soldier must indeed be the emperor—he is too good at everything he does to be otherwise. Wang Long continues to challenge the emperor to various games or acts of refined skill that only the well-bred (with the heavens’ support) can do to a T. Hoping to con the common soldier of his cash, thereby forcing the soldier into his employ (the soldier is, after all, quite capable), Wang Long quickly finds himself out of money and no wiser as to the true identity of his opponent.
The tension between the emperor and Wang Long culminates with Wang Long’s attempted rape of Buddha’s Lust. Wang Long does not yet know who the common soldier really is, so Wang Long’s flensing will probably occur in the last or penultimate chapter. In the meantime, a former student named Millionaire Hu has entered the grounds of the bordello. (The complex of buildings making up the bordello must be huge: There are 3,000 prostitutes working there, 2,800 of whom Millionaire Hu claims to be familiar with.) Hu is no longer a student. Instead, he practices the lute and flute and has become so good at entertaining that his friends bring him along on their debaucheries. He was given the nickname “Millionaire” as a ribbing for a life of going nowhere. In addition to his musical abilities, he is also a good reader of people. When he first meets the emperor, he immediately knows he is in the presences of greatness and kowtows repeatedly to the emperor. The emperor is enchanted by Hu, who is always well behaved and respectful, to such a degree that, for the first time, the emperor loses at a drinking game and laughs hardily while losing. He finally admits to Hu that he is the emperor, and he names Hu his Sycophant-in-Chief, a position that will within a few years make real his nickname “Millionaire.”
The Chinese like a happy ending as much as Westerners: balance is restored, bad deeds are punished, and (note the cultural difference) Buddha’s Lust is received warmly into the royal court by the empress.
ká-sióng: Five stories from contemporary Taiwanese writers
Jeremy Tian, series editor
Strangers Press
Strangers Press, out of Norwich, UK, annually publishes a clutch of chapbooks from writers around the world, each group of chapbooks focusing on a different country. (A year or so ago, I reviewed their collection of new Korean literature.) What to expect from his year’s collection from Taiwan? The publisher tells us that the overarching title for the five disparate works is ká-sióng, “which means make-believe, imagine, hypothesise.”
Of the five stories, three are domestic dramas illustrating the plight of women living in a China still wrestling with traditional demands and contemporary opportunities, one is a horror story in the mode of a cautionary folktale, and the last is an SF investigation into the ethics of ending unhappiness.
Not Your Child by Lâu Tsí-û
Jenna Tang
A taut story about a woman named Chou Yu-Jie who represents and lives through Chinese society’s expectations of, attitudes toward, and assumptions about women—single and married. Yu-Jie is an assistant to and speech writer for a Taiwanese female member of parliament nicknamed Madame Mazu who stands for enlightened values regarding women, women’s rights, and sexuality. In particular, Mazu is an advocate for sex education as a way to dispel myths about sex and eliminate feelings of shame and humiliation regarding sexual matters, consensual and non-consensual.
The story begins as Yu-Jie is at a train station on her way for a long-planned trip to see her sister. But while she’s been on her way to the station, a political blow-out has exploded across the internet regarding Mazu’s response to a family whose 10-year-old daughter was raped at school—a response Yu-Jie herself scripted. The controversy concerns not only Mazu’s response but also whether the sex education reforms she has endorsed are the cause. Also in the turmoil are attitudes about good parenting, the degree to which parenting habits contribute to or inhibit sex crimes, and whether women (like Mazu) who are unmarried and have no children are capable of defining punishments suitable for such crimes and whether the penalties for sex crimes can be adequately assessed by people, especially women, who don’t have children themselves.
The overcrowded train Yu-Jie rides serves as a metaphor for the tight social constraints women are in and provides a variety of social attitudes to be voiced and heard. As the story progresses, we find out that Yu-Jie herself (unmarried, without a child) was raped by her older brother, her mother’s venerated child in a society that values boys over girls, and that Yu-Jie’s motivation for visiting her sister isn’t because of the pretense of the national holiday but because her sister’s nine-year-old daughter is at risk of being raped by her sister’s boyfriend (if he hasn’t yet already raped her). Further complicating the story of the raped 10-year-old is the fact that a physical examination of the girl shows that the stranger who attacked her wasn’t the first person to rape her—that crime was committed by someone in her family, whose attitude toward the proper punishment changes once they discover it was committed by an important (i.e., male) heir.
Cage by Qiu Miaojin
Shengchi Hsu
I knew I’d achieve my goals from the very moment I first drew up my map of success. I lived a simple life; focussed, goal-oriented, vain—myself, a bed and a desk in a room the size of a few tatami mats; a self-sufficient lifestyle that could easily have lasted 10 years or more. But I wanted things simpler still—like a good dog born to be quick on his feet, racing to catch the lure as soon as the barrier is lifted. I lived to do one thing only: to climb the summit of success and would look at myself in contempt whenever I felt a slackening.
Li Wen is a successful journalist, rising quickly within the industry, showing dedication to and a talent for reporting and the empathy required to write compelling stories. His path, however, is skewed by a refusal to submit to love, to admit to the vulnerabilities it requires. Exacerbating his flaws are two women: one named Hui, a relationship with whom ended before the story begins, which blazed for a month then died due to Wen’s fears of commitment to the real (i.e., love with another person), fears stronger than his commitment to the abstract (i.e., success). The other is Ping, a woman he meets at age 25 on top of a building they each have come to jump from. They talk each other out of suicide and don’t meet again for another five years, during which time Wen has become a notable success.
Throughout this time—before and after their initial auspicious meeting—Wen is visited by his conscience—drunk, self-demeaning, self-destructive, despite the success of his career and his ability to outrun relationships. When Wen and Ping meet again, it is because Ping is threatening suicide, and Wen is sent to cover what his editor sees as an interesting story. Wen and Ping each given a second chance: What will Wen’s conscience have to say about that?
Mountain Rat
Lulyang Nomin / Yu Teng-wei
A story with elements combining those of tales of Kafka, Poe, and Lovecraft, making for a contemporary folktale about the destruction of human souls by evil but natural forces. An allusion seems to be made, too, about dehumanizing labor, martial history, and alien religions whose spiritual forces are no match for indigenous spiritual forces.
Social
Lamulu Pakawyan / Colin Bramwell & Wen-chi Li
A young woman from an indigenous Taiwanese ethnic group makes the arduous decision to return home after college, a first for the family, rather than strike out on her own among the majority and make more money.
You used to feel like an outsider. You had always been troubled by the idea of needing to return to your tribe, but despite your misgivings you finally chose “surrender.” You became one of those who came back and stayed. You turned into who they described: the Indigenous person who proves their indigeneity by returning home.
Although hers is a matrilineal community, that does not mean the community yields power to women. She earns well enough for her to pay the mortgage on the family home that she shares with her parents, grandmother, and younger, ne’er-do-well brother, a drunk. Although matrilineal tradition says the oldest daughter will inherit the family land and house, her parents says that, after they die, she should cede ownership of the house to her brother; otherwise, he will have nothing; he’s lazy.
Her parents make matters worse by alternatingly condemning and ignoring her homosexuality, refusal to wed, to conceive. She counters, “You wanted me back, and I came back. But what I do here is not your business! Who I hang out with is not your business! Which party I support or whom I vote for is my business! What religion I want to follow is my business!”
Social explores the range of consequences faced by people navigating the dictates of tradition versus change, individual liberty versus civic responsibility. It does so in prose that is both terse and vivid, and spark empathy and support in recognizing cases in which doing the right thing is never easy and not always clear.
Cloud Labour
Sabrina Huang / Lin King
Cloud Labour is a science fiction tale set in the near future, focusing on the efforts of a group of people who can remove specific memories, associations, and emotions from anyone wealthy enough to pay for a life emotional equanimity—no regrets, no resentments, no stress. Those with the psycho-genetic ability to ingest others’ experiences, process those experiences mind and body into harmlessness. Cloud Labour explores the ethics behind the motivations and actions of the buyers, sellers, and persons who perform the service of emotional desensitization: the Proxies. Brisk and well done.
CONTEMPORARY CHINESE CARTOONISTS
Game
WildThings Comics
Paradise Systems
Game was the second anthology published in 2018 by the now-defunct WildThings Comics. A collection of contemporary alternative cartoons from mainland China, the anthology’s theme is on games, a term with an impressive range of responses to what constitutes a game. On par with the number of interpretations of the theme is the swathe of cartooning styles and techniques, which range from hand brushed to computer generated, from abstract presentation to straightforward narration, all of them devoted to expressing their creators’ unique voices: 26 stories by 26 authors across 266 pages, each cartoonist given ample room to develop an idea. (Toyoya Li, whose Ritual Machine I reviewed in #53, is represented here with “SPACE,” a 25-page story narrated in the same style as Ritual Machine). Readers who enjoy both the types of alternative comics that, say, Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly publish, and a focus on international contributions that NYRComics, will like Game, an excellent anthology of what’s going on Chinese cartooning.
Note: Much but not all the written text is translated into English (by R. Orion Martin, who operates Paradise Systems); the untranslated text is embedded in stories that do well at visually explaining themselves.
Murmur
Ganmu
Paradise Systems
Murmur collects half a dozen graphic short stories by Ganmu, a Chinese cartoonist who studied animation in Beijing. Her stories are elliptical, heavy on mood and light on details that might account for that mood, suggestive rather than explanatory—the characters are enmeshed in unhappy relationships; that’s just how it is. She favors spare lines suggesting geometric forms shaded to suggest dimension. The few lines of dialogue that appear do little to further our understanding of the narrative, much as the human dialogue in Kubrick’s 2001 does little to further our understanding of the film. Narration and visual rhetoric are minimized. The audience’s role, as with 2001, is to witness.
I Love Comics, Who Loves Me?
Yan Cong
kuš!
Yan Cong, hailing from Beijing as far as I can tell, draws in a style that unites realistically conveyed sets with cartoonishly drawn characters made of circles, ovals, and rectangles. The stories collected here are of typical of what readers of American alternative comics are already familiar with: slice-of-life anecdotes by, for, and about socially inept cartoonists. In addition to the emotional self-evisceration that tends to accompany such comics, the stories are also filled with scenes of urban streets and parks, rendered by an accomplished hand in what looks like graphite, which allows for a wide range of shading possibilities. The story beginning the book, “Comic Saint,” acts out a fantasy that seems all cartoonists wish were the case—being an appreciated pal to humanity: During a post-apocalyptic period, our hero—legless, one-armed, dollied to his errands by a team of mice—our hero is one of few people who can afford water, which now costs $10,000 a liter. It’s no problem for our hero, because he also lives in a time in which “AI understands the value of comics,” and thus “an original comic drawing can be traded for 10 tons of water.” Our hero, the cartoonist, feeds a sketch into the machine, fills his jug, and leaves to everyone else the remaining “10 tons of water.” Good stuff.