Birmingham Science Fiction Group May 2025: Chinese Horror and Sinophagia
It was a pleasure to be with the Birmingham Science Fiction Group in person to give a talk about modern Chinese horror fiction and discuss my collection Sinophagia, in particular the two horror sci-fi tales featured in it, The Waking Dream and Ti’naang. The event was packed and attended by readers of different generations. This group is one of the longest running science fiction groups in the U.K., it was a great pleasure to speak with my hosts as well as the group’s founders. I will be writing about this soon.
Posted in Events and tagged books, fiction, horror, literature, SFF
On Chinese Senses of Horror (British Fantasy Society Guest Blog)
When I put the words, “Chinese” and “Horror” together, what do you think of? Those long robed and confusingly named hopping vampires? 18th century tales of beautiful female ghosts? Or the latest tirade in the popular press regarding China’s alleged nefarious intentions? Chinese horror as a subgenre of literature is very much underexplored, and as a collector of contemporary strange tales, and a writer of China’s cultures, I am on a mission to encourage the reading, enjoyment and development of this fascinating regional genre. One of the first conditions, where I must ask readers to do some work, is to set aside your preconceptions about the nature of horror fiction, and consider, what is the Chinese Sense of Horror? Read the rest of the article here
Posted in Articles and tagged books, fantasy, fiction, horror, literature, SFF
SRFC January 2025: Sinophagia
It was an immense pleasure to return to the SRFC, which hosted a session for Sinopticon previously, to talk about Sinophagia, where I spoke to the host Caro about the challenges of pulling the collection together and “what is horror?” in China and the Anglophone West, as well as what we find frightening, and what the themes in the book tell us about contemporary Chinese society. Equally an absolute pleasure to share the stage with fellow author T.L. Huchu.
Posted in Events and tagged anthology, book club, books, genre, horror, literature, SFF
On Chinese Gothic part 1
When thinking about gothic, people tend of think of soaring castles and misshapen stone spires. But the Chinese have a sense of the gothic, which has been quietly flourishing in recent storytelling like moss on the gravestone, and harks back to literary traditions. Instead of derelict abbeys and dungeoned great houses, we have ruined temples and equally labyrinthine ancient mansions, usually enclosured with courtyards and gardens sprawling into unfathomable depths. Instead of the ghostly woman in black, we have the ethereal woman in white, for white is the colour of death and mourning for the Chinese, the white-robed woman often symbolising the innocent and pure. She is ever briefly glimpsed, through abandon quarters and desolate fields, singing, weeping, or brushing her hair. In traditional stories like Pu Songling’s Liaozhai, she’s mostly a femme fatale, a ghost or a fox demon, luring men to their demise, or leaving them to wake up cold in cobwebbed ruins. Contemporary Chinese horror inherits this aesthetic, a prime example being Cai Jun’s novella Huangcun (which you can read in Sinophagia), but the emphasis is placed more on the phantomising of victims by traditional societal constraints and expectations. This is evident in the story of the vanishing brides in Snow Tower, the ‘ghostly figure’ at the Long Clan mansion leads the protagonists to eventually discover that the women had been murdered and buried by the clan’s deranged leader on their stormy island, where the tombs of the clan’s female infants lie hidden in the underground caves. Continue Reading →
Posted in Articles and tagged books, Chinese, drama, fiction, gothic, horror, literature, storytelling, TV
Heavy Industry: The Donkey Restaurant of Tiexi
Even though I consider myself culturally Cantonese, my maternal grandmother was from Jilin and I’ve grown up aware that this region of China, as remote in the northeast, as Guangdong is remote in the southeast, is part of my heritage. So I was delighted to translate this story, which I really like in itself. Part of the fantastic literary output that is the Dongbei renaissance, translating it has felt like working on a Jia Zhangke film told in science fiction writing.
Posted in Curated & Translated and tagged Chinese, dongbei, hadron collider, heavy industry, literature, northeast China, particle technology, science fiction, translation
Queer Literature in the Sinosphere: A Review
Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is the most up-to-date English-language study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) themed literature and culture in the Chinese-speaking world. From classical homoerotic texts to contemporary boys’ love fan fiction, this book showcases the richness and diversity of queer Chinese literature across the full spectrum of genres, styles, topics and cultural politics. The book features authors and literary works from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the global Chinese diaspora. Featuring chapters by leading scholars from around the world, this book rewrites literature, history and culture from a queer lens in China and globally. Queer developments and literature must be understood within the intersectional context of their cultures of origin, especially when of non-Western provenance. My experiences of writing Chinese cultures in the Anglosphere and studies in Sinology have kept me acutely aware of the U.S. and Euro-centrism of past East Asian studies. So I was delighted to receive a review copy of this essay collection from Professor Bao. The editors’ assertion in the Introduction of their aim to “open up transnational and transcultural dialogues vis-à-vis queer literature”, confirmed the promising potential suggested by the title of the collection, to recentre the focus on the interflow of ideas and sociocultural interactions between regions within the Sinosphere. Staying faithful to the broader significance of queer worlding, Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma also set out the parameters of their curation across the wide range of genders, sexualities, interrelations and vantage points that “queer” Continue Reading →
Posted in Articles, Events and tagged china, essays, intersectional, literature, queer, Sinophone
On Horror and Identity
I love speaking at conventions. This whole career as a sinologist started with talks to anime crowds about the films, foods, myth and music of China. In the midst of the buzz around my upcoming collection, Sinophagia, I was excited to be included on the panel of “Horror and Identity” as part of this year’s Flight of Foundry, especially with such a diverse collection of fellow guests to talk about the genre, and how our lived experiences and outlooks informed it.
Posted in Events and tagged china, Chinese, fiction, genre, horror, identity, literature, SFF, translation
Half the Universe: More On Chinese Women SF Writers
A couple of years ago, I wrote an article highlighting some of China’s female science fiction writers . It is a well-known fact that women in the SF community have been heavily overlooked in China, where a hard-science-heavy tradition took root in the genre’s first ‘golden age’ of the 1950s, which in itself was a continuation of a nation-building role for sci-fi that could be traced all the way back to the beginning of the century. Although women have been active contributors to the genre since at least the 1970s, with writers such as Zhang Jing and Ji Wei, their inclination, or perceived inclination to write ‘soft science fiction’, meant they have not been as visible as male writers in previous eras. In the twenty-first century however, kēhuàn (Hanyu for sci-fi) has diversified as a genre, branching off into more character driven fiction, which integrates science with story, shifting away from works that centrally focused on science theory or concepts.
Posted in Articles and tagged china, Chinese, culture, equality, feminism, fiction, literature, science fiction, SF, SFF, women's writing
Guan Hanqing and A Dream of Splendour
Cdrama now enjoys a global following, and one of the most popular shows at the moment is Tencent’s A Dream of Splendour (directed by Liu Yang and staring Liu Yifei, Chen Xiao, Liu Yan and Lin Yun), a historical fiction series set in dynastic China. Unlike a lot of other cdrama which are based on contemporary novels, this series has been inspired by a 13th century opera of Guan Hanqing, one Yuan Dynasty’s best-loved playwright, 赵盼儿风月救风尘 (zhào pàn’ér fēngyuè jiù fēngchén), Zhao Pan’Er Courageously Saves A Lady of the Night. Instead of outlaws, notables and royalty, the frequent subjects of a lot of other historical fiction, it tells the tale of three ordinary women surviving the hardships of life through their resourcefulness and friendship, eventually turning a small teahouse into a very successful restaurant.
Posted in Articles and tagged A Dream of Splendour, Cdrama, china, Chinese, culture, fiction, literature, opera, plays, playwright, Yuan Dynasty
How SFF Is Changing
I have always maintained that diverse writers must be included in the main discourse of subject matters, rather than seconded into special interest groups, thus making them feel like oddities, rather than fully part of the community. It was with this in mind that I was so pleased to be invited to FanfiAddict’s author livestream on How SFF is Changing, which put me on a panel with a wonderful selection of authors from very different backgrounds, all writing about and working in different styles, content and traditions. There were a few points in the discussion I did not get to address at the time, or may not have been concise on, and thought I would take the opportunity to expand on them here.
Posted in Events and tagged Asian, china, commentary, diversity, fantasy, fiction, literature, livestream, mythology, representation, SFF