Living with Their Past: Post-Urban Youth Fiction
Living with Their Past: Post-Urban Youth Fiction
By Zhang Kangkang
Edited by Richard King
2003
144 pages
ISBN 962-7255-26-2
A teenager at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Kangkang was caught up in Mao's campaign to send educated urban youth "down" to poor and remote parts of rural China. On their return to the cities in the late 1970s, many began to write about their experience, and "urban youth (zhiqing) literature" was born. Zhang became one of its leading exponents.
The theme of these stories is that of urban youth—back in the cities but no longer young—confronting their past. In these stories, the reader encounters the experiences which shaped and still haunt an entire generation of Chinese.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction — 7
The Peony Garden Translated by Daniel Bryant — 15
Zhang Kangkang on ‘The Peony Garden’ — 30
Cruelty Translated by Richard King — 33
Zhang Kangkang on ‘Cruelty’ — 73
Sandstorm Translated by Cynthia Cheung, Shosha Ji, Rob Mackie, Kathleen Piovesan and Sean Tremblay with Richard King — 77
Zhang Kangkang on ‘Sandstorm’ — 139
Translators — 143
Review(s)
Review(s)
'Living with Their Past includes … three stories … Each of the stories is followed by a dialogue between Richard King and the writer. The introduction provides readers with both useful information on the author and her writing and the editor's comments on the stories and on zhiqing literature. …'
一Pacific Affairs
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AUTHOR(s)
In a career spanning thirty years, Zhang Kangkang has published novels, novellas, short stories, memoirs and numerous essays, making her one of China's leading contemporary writers.
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TRANSLATOR(s)
Daniel Bryant is a professor of Chinese at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Lyric Poets of the Southern T'ang, Ho Ching-ming Ts'ung-k'ao, and various articles, reviews, and translations, mostly concerned with pre-modern Chinese poetry.
Richard King is an associate professor of Chinese at the University of Victoria, specializing in contemporary Chinese fiction and popular culture. He is the translator of Liu Sola's novel Chaos and All That(1994) and Zhu Lin's Snake's Pillow and Other Stories (1998), both published by University of Hawai Press, the editor of the Renditions special issue on urban youth in the Chinese countryside(1988), and co-editor of Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia (University of BC Press, 2002).
Cynthia Cheung, Shosha Ji, Rob Mackie, Kathleen Piovesan and Sean Tremblay read and translated 'Sandstorm' for a fourth-year Chinese course at the University of Victoria in 2001.