the Beijinger

The Committing Journalism session of the Beijing Bookworm's International Literary Festival started about five minutes ago, and before you start complaining about why we didn’t tell you earlier (we did by the way), let us reassure you that the session was one of the most popular of all the events associated with the festival and tickets sold out long ago. Those lucky few who did manage to get a ticket, will currently be listening to three veteran journalists: Rob Gifford (NPR), James Kynge (Financial Times) and Jonathan Watts (The Guardian), discuss the ethics, challenges and joys of being a journalist in China. Melinda Liu, currently Newsweek Beijing Bureau chief and president of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, is moderating the session. Former that’s Beijing staff writer Alice Xin Liu caught up with Melinda before the session to ask her a few questions about being a journalist in China.

tbjblog: What is the biggest surprise that you have had during your time in China?

ML: That mainland Chinese could become so greedy and so tacky so fast. The level of bad taste and money-grubbing that you see here today took many decades of nurturing for other cultures to achieve – not just the West but also places like Taiwan. When I moved here to open the Newsweek bureau in 1980, people still spent a lot of energy trying to seem egalitarian. This weekend on the highway I passed a wedding motorcade with dozens of brand-new black Mercedes' trailing a white stretch Hummer festooned with roses. I found it revolting — and was mesmerized.

Long before embarking on a career in photojournalism that would include winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union, before winning the 1989 Picture of the Year award for his coverage of China, before photographer Liu Heung Shing had ever picked up a camera - he was attending grade school in Fujian province. Years later, in 2008, Liu put his lifetime of experience photographing China to work editing China: Portrait of a Country. The huge book of photographs, taken by 88 Chinese photographers, gives a visual history of the country from 1949 to the present day, and has been hailed by many as one of the best books on the “New China” ever published. Liu will be taking part in the sold out Committing Journalism session at the Bookworm's International Literary Festival The Beijinger asked Liu about the book, and about his extraordinary career. You can browse our March issue (online version here) for interviews with many of the other authors appearing at the festival. You can browse the events here or on the Bookworm's official Literary Festival page.

All photos and photo captions below are taken from Liu Heung Shing's book, China: Portrait of a Country.

“This society is like a dirty river,” Chinese novelist Murong Xuecun says, his words tumbling out in a rapid-fire stream. “The river holds all kinds of people and all kinds of behaviour. Some can melt into the river, others can’t.” Murong’s dark world view has informed a string of Chinese bestsellers and made him the enfant terrible of the country’s often staid literary scene. With the publication of an English edition of Leave Me Alone – A Novel of Chengdu in Hong Kong, and Murong’s appearance at the Bookworm Literary Festival, Beijingers now have the chance to experience Murong’s hard-boiled style.

The Bookworm Literary Festival is still some weeks away, but tickets have been selling like hotcakes. This morning the Bookworm announced the following sessions have already sold out:

Native Beijinger Yiyun Li moved to the US in 1996 to pursue a PhD in immunology. Less than ten years later, however, she still didn't have that doctorate, but she'd earned three Master's degrees - in immunology, creative writing and non-fiction - published a book (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) and was in the midst of attempting to convince US immigration officials that she was a writer "of extraordinary ability."

People in the know had no doubt of Li's extraordinary ability. The literary world rallied to her defense in her quest to gain residency: Salman Rushdie called her "the real thing," New Yorker editor David Remnick named Li "destined to become the leading writers of their generation," Pulitzer prizewinning short story writer James Alan McPherson described her as "reinvigorating the English language." Meanwhile, her first book, a collection of short stories titled A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, received award after award (Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction).

Li's travails with US Immigration are not yet finished, but even the bureaucratic stooges can't stay blind to Li's ability forever. In the meantime, she's living and teaching in California, and this week, she's back in Beijing for the Bookworm Literary Festival, talking tonight and Thursday (for the festival closing, with author/director Zhu Wen - see below for more detail on the events). tbjblog asked Li a few questions about her love of writing and the experience of being a writer abroad.

tbjblog: Much like most of our readers, you yourself are an "expatriate." How has
that experience shaped your writing?

YL:: Interesting. I have never thought of myself as an expatriate. I am the kind of person who would stay in a hotel room and imagine about the world whether I am in New York or London, but I do have to admit that living in a foreign land one does, from time to time, obtain an invisibility, which is great for a writer, so when I am not hiding behind the curtain I go into the world to look at people's faces.

tbjblog: You're quoted in an article in the Washington Post as saying that you can only really write in English - can you comment on that a bit more?

YL:: I had never written anything (creatively) in Chinese and when I started writing I picked up English, which has become my first language in writing. When I write I think in English, and the language is as an important part of the storytelling as the rest of the stories, so it's hard to imagine to write the stories in Chinese.

In advance of his talk yesterday – which kicked off the first event in this year’s Bookworm International Literary Festival, Dave Eggers opens up about getting lost, visits to the Flying Pigeon Bicycle Factory, his narrative nonfiction writing process, balloon animals, and how publishing is most definitely not dying.

We asked notable Beijingers: "What's on your bookshelf?" Here's how Dr. Geoff Raby, the Australian ambassador to China, answered:

The Bookworm's Literary Festival kicks of TONIGHT (Friday, March 5), so over the next few weeks we'll be asking notable Beijingers: "What's on your bookshelf?" Who better to start with than Alex Pearson, owner of the Bookworm?

Tonight at the Bookworm, prolific Chinese to English translator Howard Goldblatt sits down with the tall writer/translator (and former that's Beijing editor - who also happens to be working with the Immersion Guides team on a new project called Beijing by Foot) Eric Abrahamsen to talk about contemporary Chinese fiction as part of Beijing Bookworm's International Literary Festival. Tickets to this great event sold out long ago, but the Bookworm assures us that audio of the session will be available soon. Later in the evening, Goldblatt will help to launch the English translation of Wolf Totem by Chinese author Jiang Rong. Both speakers know the book well as Goldblatt translated it into English and Abrahamsen wrote a profile of the author on the Paper Republic website.

We interviewed both the author and also the translator for the March issue of that's Beijing (click here to read the interviews) and we reviewed Wolf Totem here. Below we offer you the un-cut, directors edit, extended version of Michaela Kabat's interview with Goldblatt.

Extended Interview:

tbjblog: : Your journey into the Chinese language and field of translation was a bit unusual. Can you describe the process?

HG: Unlike most of my peers, I had no academic training in Chinese. My “journey” began when I was sent to Taiwan by the US Navy during the Vietnam era. I began studying Chinese on my own and somehow managed to get good enough at it to enroll in an advanced language course at Taiwan Normal University when my military obligations ended in the late 60s. Back in the US, I decided to parlay my still underdeveloped fluency into graduate degrees. Like the blind cat that “catches” a dead mouse, as the Chinese saying goes, I kept stumbling into good opportunities and falling under the tutelage of great teachers. After happily “discovering” the Northeastern Chinese novelist Xiao Hong, on whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation, I got a teaching job and a couple of requests to translate some short Taiwanese stories for a literary quarterly. It was like coming home.