Posts featuring Li Zi Shu

The Perennial Moon: An Interview with Li Zi Shu and YZ Chin on Mahua Fiction

Mahua writers. . . have eschewed the “pure” language passed down through the eons in favor of depicting reality on the ground. . .

Mahua literature, or Malaysian Chinese literature, emerged in the early twentieth century, drawing inspiration from the Wusi (May Fourth) Movement and reflecting on localised identities, questions of belonging, and negotiations of culture within plurilingual, multicultural Malaysia. Often subjected to nationalist policies that prioritise creative works in Malay, Mahua literature occupies a liminal space, overlooked by Malaysia, mainland China, and the larger Chinese-speaking world, yet resonant in its transnational and Sinophone dimensions, according to scholar Cheow Thia Chan in Malaysian Crossings (2023). Many Mahua authors write in conversational Chinese (Bai hua) embedded with atmospheric Malaysian locality. Called a “transperipheral” formation outside borders by Chan, it navigates a global marginality with a style that’s almost an anomaly—and rightfully so.

Among these Mahua voices, Li Zi Shu stands out as a representative figure, along with King Ban Hui, Li Tianbao, Zeng Linglong, Ho Sok Fong, and Ng Kim Chew. Born in Ipoh, Perak in Malaysia, Li Zi Shu worked as a schoolteacher, dishwasher, shoe store salesperson, and then a journalist before dedicating herself fully to writing short novels. Eventually, she began writing longer works, including her celebrated first full-length novel The Age of Goodbyes, published in its Chinese original in Taiwan in 2010 and in mainland China two years later. Chosen as one of the best novels by Asia Weekly in 2010 and China Times in 2011, the novel was translated into English by Louise Meriwether Prize-winning Malaysian fictionist YZ Chin for Feminist Press.

In this interview, I spoke with Li (in West Malaysia) and Chin (in New York) in a conversation that spans Li’s novels, especially The Age of Goodbyes, the diaspora of Mahua writers and Malaysian Chinese communities, and what it means to not belong.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Zi Shu, your novel The Age of Goodbyes was described by Michael Berry in The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (2016) as “not only a new take on Malaysian Chinatown life during the 1960s but also a fresh use of the Chinese language, tinged with a neoclassical style, and a complex metafictional narrative.” Could you share how this novel come together over time?

Li Zi Shu (LZS): The Age of Goodbyes was written before I turned forty. At that time, I felt a sense of urgency—I had been writing for over a decade, mostly short stories and flash fiction. I was eager to try my hand at a longer form, or rather, I truly wanted to craft something more “grand,” something that could be regarded as a “great” work. Looking back now, I realize that was a somewhat naive perspective, and perhaps a misunderstanding of what literature is. Over the years, I have developed a much greater appreciation for the subtle and the minute. Nonetheless, before I turned forty, I held high expectations for this long novel. I wanted to pour all my knowledge and ideas accumulated over the years into this one work. The use of a metafictional narrative was a deliberate “device,” partly because it allowed the novel to have more space—much like adding an attic or a cellar to a house, enabling multiple layers of storytelling to coexist. At that time, I was eager to demonstrate everything I could do with a novel within a single piece. The structural choice of metafiction was driven by that desire.

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What’s New in Translation: November 2022

New work from Danish, Chinese, and Russian!

In this month’s of newly released translations, we are featuring works that traverse across landscapes of psychology, politics, perspectives, and coastal enclaves. From a travelogue that corporealizes a vision into reality, a fragmented ghost story that equally interrogates readership with writership, and a psychically dense political fiction that follows the twists of truths into fictions, these works are full of metamorphoses, imaginations, and materializations—all that possible within the realm of the text.

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A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight, Graywolf Press, 2022

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A line extends from Skagen, Denmark to Den Helder, Holland—a complex, jagged, six hundred mile stretch of coast. On a map, it is a fixed mark, something definite and present, representing a real place that exists today: the division between land and sea, a place of dunes and marshes, sweeping tides, surging storms, wind farms, gulls, and people. In A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast, celebrated Danish author Dorthe Nors asserts her dream for this line to be less static and more flexible, persistently animated, always moving, ever changing, evolving with its points marked in time just as much in time as they are in space. Her line reverberates heritage and memory, holidays, tragedy, Vikings, shipwrecks, disco ferries, and local gossip. In this first work of nonfiction, Nors brings Denmark’s western coast to life in fourteen essays, now available in a beautiful translation by Caroline Waight.

Each essay offers an exquisite, layered exploration of a different stretch of that wild North Sea coast, and the first one begins at the top. Nors is from west Jutland, but she has found herself living in Copenhagen, with a noisy neighbor next door and a hash dealer below, and she comforts herself there with sounds of the sea played through an app on her phone. She did not plan to write a book of essays (she was supposed to be working on a novel), but her publisher was insistent. They asked, and then they asked again.

I said, ‘I’ll have to think it over,’ and I did. Or I dreamt. In the dream, I was setting off across the landscape in my little Toyota. I saw myself escaping several years of pressure from the media by driving up and down the coast. Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

From Scheherazade to Avicii, the literary news of the week spans new looks at pivotal figures.

From book fairs to bestsellers, the world of international letters knows no rest. In Qatar, the 31st Doha International Book Fair has launched with an in-person schedule. In Japan, a new project aiming to promote Southeast Asian and Indian literature has published an impressive roster of short fiction, and in Sweden, two beloved figures are immortalized in text. Read on to find out more!

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Happy New Year from the world of Arabic literature! With Omicron, media frenzies, and restrictions around the world, we could all use some escape. Travel might be limited, but how about an escape to the fantasy world of Arabian Nights? The iconic collection that has inspired countless others around the world, from the Brothers Grimm to Naguib Mafhouz, has received a fresh new translation by Yasmine Seale—known for her riveting new translation of Aladdin. Enter the world of ghouls, mystics, and enchantresses, and enjoy your COVID-free time travel (it has some brilliant images!).

The theme of time travel continues with the launch of the Winter issue of Arab Lit Quarterly! Responding to the theme of folk and featuring great writers such as Palestinian author Sonia Nimr, this issue promises to “cover stories, songs, and poetry from the last millennium, from Andalusia to Yemen, with stops across the cities in between!” You can get your copy here.

That being said, the world is not entirely being relegated to the virtual, as Qatar launches the 31st Doha International Book Fair for the year of 2022, under the theme of “light is knowledge.” Finally, we will visit our first in-person book fair in years, which will host renowned Arabic book distributors such as Samarkand Books from Qatar and Antoine Cachet from Lebanon! READ MORE…