CLRC(UK) Winter Season – Feb and March (Next up: Shi Tiesheng)

Welcome to the Chinese Literature Book Club (CLRC) Winter 2023 season. For friends just joining us, CLRC is a safe space for like-minded individuals to meet up and discuss the best Sinophone writing. for old friends familiar with the series there has been a slight change in how we organise CLRC. Now, by signing up to one of our book club events, you will be kept up to date on the entire season! You can easily pick and choose which you would like to attend – so whether you drop in once, or attend fanatically, we can promise it will be a great time!

As you may have gleaned from the above, CLRC is being ‘Seasonalised’. While we will still be meeting monthly (and still having riveting discussions about Sinophone literature with translators and experts, of course), the Eventbrite signup page will now serve as the signup for the whole season and will be periodically updated to reflect the next events coming up.

We have two exciting events coming up for you! There will be a variety of guests, so sign up with Eventbrite to register for the season, and receive reminders before each event and updates on previous discussions.

For the Winter Season we have two great books for you:

– Shi Tiesheng’s My Travels in Ding Yi 23rd February (7:30pm GMT) (Link)

With Professor Sarah Dauncey, whose research focuses on disability in China, and Chloe Starr, Associate Professor of Asian Christianity and theology.

– Li Er’s Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree 31st March (5pm GMT) (link)

with translator Dave Haysom

Sign up for both events via Eventbrite to be reminded about these discussions.

About the Next Book:

My Travels in Ding Yi

The flesh is a boundary, you and I are two cages.

“Of all the brief lives I’ve inhabited, humans are definitely the most interesting. Poetry and painting, literature and drama, song and dance; there’s nothing they can’t do.

As I fell into this young creature named Ding Yi, a life filled with hardship, love and betrayal unfolded before me.

I’ll try to make this account as entertaining as possible, but please bear with me – it was several lifetimes ago.”

My Travels in Ding Yi is an epic novel told from the perspective of a nomadic spirit named Shi who inhabits a Chinese boy living in the second half of the 20th century. Shi describes coming of age during the Cultural Revolution in language that dips and soars from crude to lyrical, often in a single breath. Unpredictable and engrossing, this contemporary classic of Chinese fiction was first published in 2006 and is now available in English for the first time.

About the Author

Shi Tiesheng (195-2010) was one of the most prominent Chinese writers of the second half of the 20th century. Born in Beijing in 1951, he attended Tsinghua University High School before being sent down to Yan’an, Shaanxi province as part of the Cultural Revolution campaign to re-educate urban youths in the countryside. An injury to his spine in 1971 left him paralysed from the waist down. On returning to Beijing, he wrote as a way to process his grief and explore the world. His first work of fiction was published in 1979, and he went on to write a number of acclaimed books, including Notes On Principles and several short story and essay collections. Shi’s 1985 novella Like a Banjo String was turned into a film by the acclaimed director Chen Kaige. In January 2018 The Complete Works of Shi Tiesheng was published by Beijing Publishing House, comprising twelve volumes of his novels, short stories, essays, scripts, poetry, letters and interview transcripts. His essay The Temple of Earth and I is considered a masterpiece and is taught throughout schools in China.

About the Guests

Professor Sarah Dauncey

Sarah Dauncey is Professor of Chinese Society and Disability at the University of Nottingham, UK. She completed her PhD in late-Ming dynasty fashion and women’s culture at the University of Durham in 2000 and has since then researched and taught on a wide variety of subjects related to Chinese culture and society, both pre-modern and contemporary. Her current research focuses on disability in China, in particular the way in which the changing Chinese socio-political environment has transformed the cultural encoding of disability from the end of the Cultural Revolution. Her recent book Disability in China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2020) was the first to combine an in-depth exploration of disability culture in China within a disability studies framework and includes discussion of Shi Tiesheng, China’s most famous and ground-breaking ‘disabled writer’.

Associate Professor Chloe Starr

Professor Starr is an expert in Asian Christianity and theology, and is currently editing and translating a reader in Chinese Christian theology and working on a volume on Chinese Christian Fiction. Prof. Starr’s taught previously at the universities of Durham, where she was Senior Tutor of St. John’s College, and Oxford, where she taught classical Chinese literature. Other works include Red-light Novels of the Late Qing (2007); a coedited volume, The Quest for Gentility in China (2007); and an edited volume, Reading Christian Scriptures in China (2008).

About the Host

Angus Stewart is host of the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, a show which aims to save the world. He’s a former employee of Sinoist Books. His writing has seen occasional publication, most recently in Ab Terra 2021, an anthology in which you can find his short story Meta-Shanghai – recommended for all fans of weird fiction and SimCity 4.