books feature
Journey To The East
Sonya Hallett talks to Book Director Catherine Lockerbie, as well as authors Xiaolu Guo and Jonathan Fenby, about the ‘Focus On China’ strand at this year’s Festival
So it’s August, it’s 2008 and it’s the Olympics in Beijing. Back here in rainy Edinburgh, away from all the sportsmen, fireworks and state-controlled-sunshine, the sinophiles amongst us can see anything from the Chinese State Circus’s ‘Special Olympic Performance’ to ‘Chinese Elvis – The King From Beijing’. But if you fancy the more literary side of things, the Edinburgh International Book Festival also has a wealth of China-related events on offer, including no less than five Chinese authors, and numerous speakers and experts on all aspects of the Middle Kingdom.
I spoke with Catherine Lockerbie, Director of the Book Festival, about the ‘Focus on China’ line-up and how it came about: “We actually started the ‘Focus On China’ strand four years ago when we noticed this incredible momentum in the country’s development that needed to be explored. At the time, publishers and people in the UK in general were not grasping the enormous implications of what’s happening there, though now we’ve all become much more aware.”
One of the guests is Xiaolu Guo, Chinese novelist and filmmaker, perhaps best known for her ‘A Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers’. I asked her why she feels there is such a growing demand for Chinese literature here today: “Chinese literature has always existed strongly but quietly; it’s just that now there seems to be an urgent demand for understanding Chinese culture from a Western point of view – finding out about personal voices and personal stories.”
Catherine Lockerbie agrees, “unless we know what another culture is reading, writing and thinking, how can we begin to understand them? Books are an open window onto another culture. It’s all very well reading our analysis from the newspapers, but unless we have access to the imagination and what is really happening, we can’t begin to understand what’s going on. And there’s so much that people in the West don’t understand about China and Chinese people.”
But what is it that we need to understand? Someone who might have a good idea is Jonathan Fenby, an eminent China historian who’s already published no less than four books on the topic in the past year. I asked him what misconceptions people still have about China and how writing from and about the country can help to demystify our common myths and misconceptions. “Most people in the West, including many politicians, do not know what to make of China. Business people see it as a great opportunity, both as a supplier and a market. But generalisations are the order of the day. People writing about China now are contributing, in one way or another, towards putting together a new narrative. This applies to Chinese novelists as well as to historians. My own books deal with general events and leading figures, but one hopes that we will see more ‘grassroots’ literature telling how people lived and how different areas of China developed.”
So if all this has whetted your appetite to read more about China, what should you look out for? Catherine Lockerbie has the last word: “I’d like to give special mentions to Xiaolu Guo and to Yiyun Li, whose book, ‘A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers’, is one of the most remarkable collections of short stories I’ve read in a long time. I mention her because the stories illuminate aspects of being Chinese that non-fiction really can’t get near. Also there’s Mark Leonard, another one of our speakers, whose work on China is outstanding – for people who want a little snapshot of what’s going on now, his book ‘What China Thinks’ is a very good starting point.”
The ‘Focus On China’ programme was a strand at the Edinburgh International Book Festival - http://www.edbookfest.co.uk
published: Oct-2008
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