This is the last issue of Chinese Literature Today (CLT). Starting in 2022, we will merge with the journal Contemporary Chinese Thought to become Chinese Literature and Thought Today (CLTT). While I may miss the old title, I am full of hope that a more interdisciplinary journal can aptly address the many contemporary challenges to the humanities from transnational perspectives and serve as a more dynamic bridge between the Chinese and English reading and writing communities. We warmly thank our readers and contributors for their support in the past decade and we will continue to produce rich, engaging, and beautiful issues in the coming years.
The featured Chinese writer in this issue is Xue Yiwei 薛忆沩. The American Chinese writer Ha Jin views Xue as a maverick in contemporary Chinese literature. Although Xue is a prominent contemporary Chinese writer, he persists in taking the road less traveled. In the thirty years of his writing career, Xue has constantly challenged himself, his readers, and the boundaries of literature. His sober and philosophical style is undergirded by his passion for life, knowledge, and language. In the opening interview of this special section dedicated to Xue Yiwei, scholar Lin Gang conducts readers through an excellent in-depth review and analysis of Xue’s three decades of writing. The next four pieces are translations of Xue Yiwei’s own works from different periods, including Xue’s “Secretary Girl,” a short story featured in Xue’s award-winning collection Shenzheners (Shenzheng ren, 2017); selected excerpts from Traveling with Marco Polo (Yu Make Boluo tongxing), a 2012 creative collection that dialogues with Invisible Cities by the postmodern Italian writer Italo Calvino; selected extracts from Desertion (Yiqi), Xue’s first novel, published in 1989; and “The Former Courier Station,” a short story collected in Xue’s 2012 anthology The Dolphin That Won’t Leave (Buken liqu de haitun). The section ends with two essays analyzing Xue’s works: Hu Ying discusses the literary experiments Xue carried out in Traveling with Marco Polo, while Lin Gang shows why Xue’s King Lear and Nineteen Seventy-Nine (“Lier Wang” yu 1979) stands out as the one and only modernist Chinese novel.
It is noteworthy that Xue Yiwei has been remarkably responsive, helpful, and detail-oriented in the process of putting together this special section. I want to take this opportunity to show my immense gratitude for Xue’s extraordinary contribution to this issue.
The next special section, Chinese Women Migrant Workers’ Literature, guest-edited by Hui Faye Xiao, is also an impressive undertaking. In March 2021, World Literature Today published a special section on Chinese migrant workers’ literature that Hui Faye Xiao and I co-edited. During the process of working on this WLT special section, we felt the need to introduce English readers to even more voices of women migrant workers who have taken literature as an emotional outlet and a weapon of resistance. Xiao thus assembled this special section for CLT. Xiao’s opening essay discusses the gendered resistance and solidarity in Chinese domestic workers’ writings. In the following essay, Haoming Gong reads Chinese migrant poetess Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poems through the intersecting categories of gender, class, and capital. Next, Eleanor Goodman examines Zheng Xiaoqiong’s unique poetics within a larger literary and sociological framework through the lens of translation. This special section also features the literary works of the Chinese women migrant workers themselves, including Zheng Xiaoqiong’s recent short fiction “Migrations—A Feather,” translated and introduced by Zhou Xiaojing; Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poems as translated by Eleanor Goodman; a collection of poems by three women migrant workers—Li Ruo, Wang Jingyun, and Meng Yu—translated by Tammy Lai-ming Ho; and translated essays by Fan Yusu, Ma Xiang, Li Ruo, Meng Yu, and Dust. These selected works are valuable because, as Xiao writes in her opening essay, they represent women migrant workers’ active efforts “to build up a literary collective pushing for accumulative micro-changes characterized by cultural creativity, gendered resistance, and grassroots solidarity.”