from A Contrarian’s Tales

Yang Dian

Artwork by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee

Folding Bed In the winter of ’52, Zhou of Luoyang was sent a foldable steel spring bed by a relative in South America. Asleep on the bed, a person could sink into its center where they were folded like paper, with only their head exposed, not one limb visible. A year after receiving the gift, Zhou suddenly contracted myasthenia and eventually passed away. His bed’s still brand-new steel frame began to ooze oil from every inch and shuddered like a beast—revitalized—after absorbing another animal’s vitality. Zhou’s family thought this a bad omen and after ’58, tossed the bed into a backyard furnace to be smelted down and destroyed.



Nyctambulis Exorrhiza There is a tree that walks the Kunlun Mountains at night. Woody, leafless, flowering. One day the tree is perched upon the mountain’s left face, the next, on the mountain’s right. It lumbers along in the drifting sands and shade cast by the sun. Hypersensitive to moonlight, when the moon appears to the east, the tree hides to the west. It is only on pitch-black nights that the tree stands tall and still.



Revolving Door
 Seventeenth year of the Republic of China, summertime. A canteen located in Shanghai’s French Concession installs a revolving door. For four days straight, whosoever enters via this door disappears amid the spin of its panels. No trace of them can be found either inside or outside the threshold. French Concession Police circle around the compartment to investigate but produce no clues. Then, without warning, the hem of a qipao appears, protruding from between the glass, as if all of a sudden, a person has somehow wriggled inside. When an officer reaches for the corner of material, it slips back into the gap out of sight.

translated from the Chinese by Jack Hargreaves

Read the original in Chinese, Simplified

Listen to the original read by the author:

Note-style writing, or bijiti, is a Chinese literary form that can be traced back to the Southern Dynasties more than 1500 years ago. Minimalist in both length and the information that they directly convey, note-style stories derive their structure from leishu, the encyclopaedic annals that give an insight into every aspect of life in early dynastic China. Where the two genres of writing differ is their degree of fictionality. Leishu state what, as far as we know, really occurred in a particular place, at a particular time, to a particular thing or person(s), while bijiti report entirely fictional events as if having happened. Yang Dian’s A Contrarian’s Tales is a twenty-first century adaptation of the literary tradition—the first collection of its kind to be published in China in over a hundred years—that uses a mix of classical, modern, and oral language to flip reportage on its head. By dressing up fiction as and with nonfiction, Yang Dian imbues the bizarre, disarming, otherworldly, and grotesque with just enough of a taste of reality that the reader can readily populate with their imagination whatever time, place, or situation that the stories describe.

One of the main overarching translation decisions for this book was how to emulate the mixed-use of linguistic styles, as in the blending of Literary (or Classical) Chinese—the language traditionally used in Leishu—modern, vernacular Chinese, and spoken Chinese. Naturally, the differences between these language styles do not correspond to the differences between, let’s say, Early Modern English and Modern English, so I changed my approach to consider what is the effect each language has on the story and emulate that instead. Literary Chinese expression is highly concise and compact, able to evoke vivid imagery or convey abundant information in four characters or even fewer, whereas Modern Chinese expression relies on a clearer, more formulaic grammar that results in longer, more-familiar prose. These are two distinct styles of expression that exist in English too: an equivalent difference might be that between a thesaurus entry on a particular plant and a descriptive passage of the countryside by a novelist. This is only one approach to this challenge and far from covers all the challenges faced in translating this book, but I hope it provides an insight into a style of writing that is utterly distinct from the western traditions.

Yang Dian was born in Chongqing in 1972 and has been based in Beijing since 1985. He is a writer, artist, and Guqin expert. Known for his unique literary experiments that blend different genres and styles, he has published more than a dozen Chinese-language books including a novel, short story collections, a microfiction collection, poetry, and essays. His most recent work has been dedicated to honouring and reviving the neglected traditions of Chinese writing such as opera scripts, Guqin manuals, annotations, commentaries, and the encyclopaedic leishu through recontextualising the storytelling inherent within them for a modern reader. A Contrarian’s Tales is his first book to be translated into any language; no publisher has as of yet been found.

Jack Hargreaves is a writer and Chinese-English translator who having studied and worked in Southampton, Nanjing, Chengdu, Xiamen, and Minneapolis is now based in London. Specialising in literary and academic texts, Jack has translated more than one million Chinese characters, including Buddhism-related works, historical and philosophical works, creative non-fiction by Ye Duoduo and Yuan Ling, and a variety of short fiction. Forthcoming translations include Li Juan’s Winter Pasture, Yang Dian’s flash fiction collection A Contrarian’s Tales, and A History of Chinese Philosophical Thought by Zhang Xianghao.