What Chinese readers consume diverges from what is translated into English. Writers of ordinary life are often left untranslated—until now.
Tag: China
Mae Ngai: “We’ve Always Had Activists in Our Communities”
“Americans—whether they believe they are not racist or whether they are stone-cold racists—still struggle to see the structures of racism.”
“They Don’t See Their Work as Surveillance”: Jennifer Pan on Chinese Welfare and Society
“It’s like ‘The Minority Report,’ only without psychics.”
Energy “Realism” Is Climate Fatalism
Americans may not want to hear this, but it might be best if the US is not the country leading the world through the climate crisis.
Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
Working in China in the COVID-19 Era
China managed to maintain some economic activity during the lockdown, but at what cost and under what conditions?
Shanghai’s Past, Hong Kong’s Future
What does it mean for a city to be free? What happens when a free city loses its freedom? And when does that occur?
Caught Mapping
The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives.
“To Reach the Pure Realm of the Imaginary”: A Conversation with Cixin Liu
The renowned Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu is best known as the author of the best-selling, Obama-beloved, Hugo-winning, and truly mind-bending trilogy ...
How Ken Liu Translates, and Why He Writes
Ken Liu is a celebrated author of American speculative fiction and a pathbreaking translator of Chinese science fiction into English. He has won the ...
The University and the Station: A Brontë Bicentenary in Taiwan
It takes a circuitous taxi ride winding up Lianhai Road to reach Taiwan’s …
Underground Distractions, Shanghai
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Windows on trains and planes are equipped with shades: vertical or horizontal ...
The Met Goes to China
In July, while in New York, I toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s much buzzed about “China: Through the Looking Glass,” a visually stunning multimedia exhibit that showcases the varied ways that ...
Famine Fiction
Betraying friends. Trading sex for food. Devouring human flesh. All of these occurred during the famine that followed China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), and all of them ...
China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of ...
Otherworlds
In the history of modern comics—as in the history of comic’s cousin, film—there have long been two competing impulses. Film history contrasts the styles of two pioneers: the documentary realism of ...
Who is General T?
By now the March 30, 2005 Powerball drawing seems to have taken on the workings of a tall tale: In a pot nearing $14 million, Powerball officials usually expect four to five second-place ...
Mo Yan through a Dog’s Eyes
Mo Yan, born Guan Moye, is widely regarded as one of contemporary China’s most talented and accomplished authors. Predictably, his receipt of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature has brought him an ...
China, Middlebrow to Highbrow
Fiction has more than one way of distancing itself from the real. In most cases this distance serves as a prelude to a future homecoming. The story, like some interstellar traveler, flings itself ...