Category: Translation

Campus awakenings in Beijing – by Xie Ding, translated by Natascha Bruce

In fall 2003, around midday every Wednesday, I used to bike from the Wan Liu dorms over to class on the Peking University (Beida) campus. I was always in a rush, a little on edge.

It had been a tense year. First came SARS, which kept us all cooped up in the dorms. Then I caught a cold and was whisked off to a guest house in the southwest corner of campus, where I spent days quarantined in a tiny room, contemplating mortality. Then the new term started. We forgot about the upheaval we’d just been through. Our lives had ground to halt during the SARS outbreak and then, just like that, we put it all behind us. The same would soon be true of those leisurely hours spent in study and contemplation – just like that, graduation and job hunting would come to replace them. It was my final year at Beida. I selected a few courses at random, to make up credits. At the time, Zhao Xiaoli was a lecturer, teaching a course called ‘The History of Western Legal Thought.’

New reportage by Ma Jinyu, translated by Kate Costello

This is a translation of an article from One-Way Street magazine, with their support, translated by and published in collaboration with Paper Republic; it was made possible by Sinocism and individual supporters of China Channel on Patreon.

On October 11th, the village hosted a big show. This was always the most lively time of year in the village. Stalls selling mutton soup, beef meatballs, oil-cakes and hand-shaved noodles crowded around the stage. The steam swirled and the oil-cakes bubbled in their pot, the mutton soup at a rolling boil. The drums of the opening scene pulled at the villagers’ heartstrings, as the soulful arias of ‘Orphan Zhao’ resounded in the heavens. But Old Man Liang shut himself indoors.

For many years Old Man Liang had held back from the village festivities, even though he lived only a dozen meters from the stage. Occasionally, if he walked past the road in front of the stage, the villagers would turn to look back at him, shouting their hellos. He said that he wasn’t willing to participate, but judging by his expression I guessed that it was more likely that he thought that a man of his profession might dampen the mood.

Short fiction by Xie Hong – translated by Ding Yan and Ray Hecht

Wu Ming and Liu Xiang chatted while walking along the pedestrian line to cross the road. A taxi drove past quickly, and they both waved for it to stop just before it was too late.

The driver must have seen them out of the corner of his eye, and he braked hard, but the car slid past quite a distance before it came to a complete stop.

Wu Ming grabbed his wife Liu Xiang and the two ran towards the taxi. Losing her balance, Liu Xiang almost fell. “What’s the rush?” she grumbled.

Wu Ming slowed down after that. As they strode toward the taxi, a woman with a child waiting at a bus stop caught his attention, and he froze: The woman was none other than Liu Qing.

Science fiction by Chen Qiufan – translated by Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu

Lao Sun lived on the 17th floor facing the open street, nothing between him and the sky. If he woke in the morning to darkness, it was the smog's doing for sure.

Through the murky air outside the window, he had to squint to see the tall buildings silhouetted against the yellow-gray background like a sandy-colored relief print. The cars on the road all had their high beams on and their horns blaring, crammed one against the other at the intersection into one big mess. You couldn't tell where heaven and earth met, and you couldn't tell apart the people, either. Passels of pedestrians, dusty-faced under filter masks that made them look like pig-faced monstrosities, walked past the jammed cars.

Fantastical sci-fi by Fei Dao – translated by Alec Ash

Once upon a time, there was a King, who loved neither the beauty of his domain nor its women, but only took pleasure in listening to stories. He kept a storyteller in his palace, but the number of tales that any one person can know is limited, and whenever a minstrel had told them all the King would exile him far, far away. After a while, no one dared tell any story.

And so the King convened the most ingenious scientists in the land, and ordered them to build a storytelling robot. At first, the stories that the robot told were lifeless, but it had the ability to learn independently, and under the supervision of the scientists it slowly perfected the quality. Its brain was installed with every story that was known of, and each night the King, tired from the affairs of state and wanting to relax, ordered the robot to spin him a yarn. If the King could not hear two or three short stories before retiring, he was not able not sleep.