Chick Lit and Chinese Pirates - Latest Book Picks

I Sailed With Chinese Pirates
by Aleko Lilius

The Pearl River Delta in the 1920s was a lawless place, with bands of pirates hijacking ships, kidnapping villagers, and extorting money from fishing fleets – when they weren’t hiding out in opium dens and gambling houses in Macau. In those days, when “adventurer” was still considered a profession, Finnish-American Aleko Lilius described his dramatic journey aboard a heavily armed pirate junk and his imprisonment in a Hong Kong jail.

Although much of the language is couched in the White Man’s colonialist-speak of the day, Lilius’ eye for detail and flashes of self-deprecating humor make this book a fun read. A bestseller when it was first published in 1930, it is newly available in a paperback edition. MH

Lipstick Talk 口红集
by Liu Suola

By using her creative pluck to ignite a yearning for true freedom, Liu Suola just might be the most rebellious woman in modern China. Make no mistake – this is a book about women, for women – but Liu sidesteps the chick-lit formula by empowering readers rather than merely offering comfort.

Both sassy and sarcastic, Lipstick Talk reads like a collection of girl-to-girl wisdom gleaned from everyday life. Liu tosses around ideas about feminism, men, relationships, music, fashion and travel with laissez-faire frivolity, and yet manages to expose certain raw truths about human behavior that will make you rethink the meaning of the word liberty. EY

The Red Notebook: True Stories
by Paul Auster

Paul Auster is best known for his absurdist crime fiction, but his collection of vignettes about “the paradox of coincidence” is a fantastic page-turner in its own right. The Red Notebook, first published in 1992, has just reached China in the form of a pocket-sized bilingual edition.

Written in plain language that moves with an easy flow, these autobiographical tales range from bizarre (i.e. a friend of Auster’s discovers she’s married to her long-lost brother) to downright spooky (i.e. a lightning strike kills a friend standing right next to him); Auster also relates the creepy coincidence that inspired his famous novel City of Glass. EY

Me and My Father’s Generation 我与父辈
by Yan Lianke

Renowned author Yan Lianke has always considered himself a peasant writer. Drawing on a deep passion for the remote Henan village where he grew up, he now tells the touching life stories of his late father and two uncles. The men spent their youths toiling in poverty through the ’60s and ’70s, developing an enduring devotion to the land and philosophy of life and death that was typical of Chinese peasants of their generation. Yan balances their story with a delicate and honest account of his relationship with his father. All hard-working villagers should be so lucky to have a native son pay them such an elegiac tribute. AW