Q1. You and you fellow editors have created a wonderful volume on contemporary queer Chinese art that is otherwise almost invisible in English (and suppressed or with compromised visibility in Chinese contexts). What was it like to curate a volume that included contributors and subjects ranging from film-makers like Shi Tou 石頭 and Fan Popo 範坡坡 (who are also artists and activists), to kink practitioners, performance artists, artists like Ma Liuming 馬六明 working with trans motifs, ‘neuroqueer’ artists, and seasoned curators like Si Han 思漢?  

Thank you for your very kind words, Ari. The book is a labour of love and an outcome of collaborative work between editors and numerous artists, activists, curators, and scholars. We are indebted to so many people. Without their generous help and support, this book wouldn’t have been possible.

You are spot-on about the sheer diversity of the book. From the outset, we didn’t want to make this a conventional academic book. We wanted to challenge the conventional categories of cultural forms (e.g. fine art, traditional art, media and film, installation, and performance art) as well as the distinctions between and hierarchies of professions. We would like to make the book more interesting, diverse, and inclusive, by including the voices of artists, curators, critics, activists, and scholars – many of these categories overlap for our contributors, anyway.

Linguistic and cultural translation was an integral part of the project. Many artists and scholars are based in China and are more comfortable expressing themselves in Mandarin, and this fact partly contributed to their marginality and obscurity in the Anglophone world. We think it is important to showcase their work outside China. We therefore translated their essays from Mandarin Chinese to English. In some cases, we transcribed their online talk verbatim and then translated the transcript into English. Kudos to our editors and translators. The translation process was a two-way dialogue between editors, translators, and artists. We often had to ask the artists for clarification and elaboration of key points, and the artists frequently challenged our understandings of queer Chinese art. Some chapters read like a person’s conversation with friends. We are pleased that we were able to preserve the verbatim, dialogical, and intimate quality of the intellectual exchange. This makes the book more reader friendly.

What draws all these chapters together is the broad concept of art (art as technique, as expression, as social intervention, as a way of life, and more) and how they can be queered, or practiced non-normatively. We ask: What if we see art practice as research, academic work as curation, and everyone as activists promoting a more capacious understanding of gender, sexuality, and human expression? We hope this book can be found in university libraries, museums, and art galleries as well as in ordinary people’s homes. It’s beautifully designed and richly illustrated, with eighty-seven colour images, and can be used as a coffee table book – well, for me at least.

Q2. In the Introduction, you note that it was in the context of ‘queer Chinese culture and activism…[facing] serious challenges in the middle of a global pandemic and under constant government crackdowns on civil society’ that the book was put together ‘as an effort to document fast disappearing and resurging queer history and culture, reflect upon what has happened and what has been achieved in the past decades and consider what we can learn from this important history’ (p.6).  

The book project started as a research workshop co-organized by our co-editor Diyi Mergenthaler at the University of Zurich in May 2021. As an invited speaker, I was overwhelmed by the fantastic work presented at the workshop. When Diyi asked my advice for the next step, I brought myself and Dr Jamie Jing Zhao (from City University of Hong Kong) on board to help turn the workshop papers into a book. We were able to list the book as the first title in a new book series called ‘Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities’ published by Bloomsbury Academic.

While we were preparing the book launch in May 2023, the sad news of the forced closure of the Beijing LGBT Centre arrived and everyone fell into silence. Queer Chinese community lost another important community space. Beijing LGBT Centre was not only a community space; it also hosted a community archive. With the loss of another important part of queer history, the work of preserving that history seems ever more important and urgent. We hope this book can function as a queer art archive to celebrate the strength, resilience, and creativity of the queer Chinese community globally.

Q3. You also mention that the book gives a ‘special focus…to the lived experiences, stories and memories inscribed in these contemporary artworks and practices’ (p.5). How do the four subthemes of the book relate to this effort to capture the ebb and flow of queer cultural production in contemporary Chinese settings, as well as the lived experiences of its producers?  

The book is divided into four sections, each dealing with a separate subtheme. The first section is dedicated to the discussion of ‘queer forms’: from traditional papercut and kinbaku (rope bondage) to children’s drawings and paintings. Many of these art forms are not traditionally seen as queer; it is the artists’ intentionality and the audience’s interpretation that lend them to queerness. They have ‘queered’ the art form or created queer art forms, so to speak. In this section, we also draw attention to issues of materials and materiality – be they paper, or rope, or acrylic paint. Access to and use of these materials ‘matters’ – both significant and pertaining to issues of materiality – to queer art. Queer cultural analysis traditionally focuses on issues of representation – that is, signs, symbols, and meanings – at the expense of objects and materiality. For queer people, physical access to these objects, materials, skills, spaces and opportunities is as important as the content of representation. Through these artworks, we hope to demonstrate that although many traditions are often seen to be queer-unfriendly or queer-insensitive, they embody enormous potential for queer use and appropriation. After all, traditions are not static; they can be queered and queer. Xiyadie’s 西亞蝶 creative use of the traditional papercut form is a good example. Papercuts are traditionally used in rural China in festive occasions such as weddings and the lunar new year to celebrate a heteronormative imagination of happiness. Xiyadie’s works boldly depict his homoerotic desires; the also document rural queer life and urban queer cruising scene, both of which have received very little scholarly attention to date.

We also wanted to draw attention to the intersection between sexuality and gender, demonstrated by the cross-fertilisation of queer and feminist movements in contemporary China. The second section of the book includes a diverse body of works that place women’s experience at the centre of their artistic and political expression. These works also highlight the role of female same-sex intimacy in helping to conceptualise women’s bodies and desires. Although not all artists identify as feminist and queer, their works manage to articulate a distinct queer feminist politics. For example, Ma Yanhong’s 馬延紅 paintings depicting male and female nudity are often seen to depict same-sex intimacy, although the characters’ sexuality is unknown. These paintings raise the issue of queer spectatorship as well as the politics of gaze: what would it be like for a female Chinese artist to paint the nude bodies of two European men, instead of the other way around? What if queerness is a way of looking at things against normative scripts of gender, sexuality, and race?

The third section engages with the emerging and exciting subfield of curatorial studies. It lays bare curators’ creative and affective work as well as the hidden power relations that structure the exhibition and labelling of artworks. We present four instances of how curators and critics translate their feminist, queer and trans politics into the way they select, interpret and exhibit artworks. Banying 半影curators Jiete Li and Claire Ping introduce how they organized the Women’s Arts Festival in Beijing in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021; their concept of turning the whole city into a ‘fluid museum’ functions as a creative feminist curatorial practice against dominant, institutionalized, and male-centred curatorial practice. Studies of two major queer Asian art exhibitions, Secret Love that took place in Stockholm in 2012 and Spectrosynthesis that took place in Taipei in 2017, demonstrate how curatorial strategies work to produce queerness and how curatorial contexts shaped these strategies. The legendary work Fen-Ma Liuming 芬·馬六明 also manifests the role of historical contexts and discursive frameworks in shaping the reception and interpretation of artworks.

The last section of the book places queer Chinese art in a transnational and diasporic context. London-based performance artist Burong Zeng 曾不容and Berlin-based filmmaker Popo Fan 範坡坡introduce their recent artworks and practices in Europe, especially during the Covid pandemic. Their works have interrogated themes such as Chineseness, orientalism and pandemic racism that many queer Chinese people encounter in the diasporic context. The book concludes with my own chapter, a discussion of the wonderful Imagining Queer Bandung project, a series of filmmaking and podcasting workshops for queer people of colour living in Europe in 2021. What is important about the project is the queer of colour solidarity centring around the political imaginary of ‘Queer Bandung’, which not only queers the hegemonic historical Bandung discourse but also articulates a queer of colour solidarity in a European context that marginalizes them.

Q4. Why do you think there has been so little work on queer Chinese art in English, given what could be understood as a proliferation—or at least the emergence of a small field—of queer Sinophone literature and cultural studies? Given how ‘queer’ contemporary Western art has been (you could even say that queerness is in its DNA), how do you explain the lack of attention to queer Chinese art in contemporary Western-language visual culture studies? 

This is an interesting question for sure. The marginality of queer Chinese art in Anglophone scholarship can result from many reasons. First of all, queer topics are considered marginal in the study of Chinese society and culture. Inside the People’s Republic of China (PRC), this is understandable as queer topics are seen as taboo topics, especially in recent years, stigmatising researchers and even putting a scholar’s career at risk. In the Anglophone world, queer researchers do not face the same degree of stigmatisation, but they are certainly marginalised institutionally. People often consider queer studies scholars to be EDI (equality, diversity, and inclusion) hires whose work may not be the best, or who only know a niche field of study and therefore cannot be hired to teach ‘bigger’ issues. Besides, although queer studies scholars often take pride in interdisciplinarity, the academia (and the academic job recruitment) is still structured by rigid disciplinary boundaries. I can’t think of many universities that advertise a position in queer studies, let alone in Chinese queer studies. Because of these discriminatory institutional structures and practices, it is extremely difficult for a queer researcher to find a long-term academic job to sustain their research.

Secondly, queer art research is marginalised in queer studies overall. Despite the proliferation of queer scholars trained in social sciences, arts and humanities scholars, especially art historians, are relatively few in number. This probably says something about the status quo of arts and humanities in neoliberal universities and in society overall as about the stubborn and often exclusionary tradition of art history as a field of study. Despite laudable decolonisation initiatives in recent years, art history is still heavily dominated by the study of white, European art history, to the exclusion of other cultures and traditions. In media and cultural studies in which I am situated, an obsession with the ‘new’, the popular and the digital does not dovetail with art historical research. The popular misconception that art is high and elite culture does not help bring media and cultural studies scholar closer to art research, either.

Thirdly, the study of contemporary Chinese art follows the art market closely and the market has certain stereotypes and conventions. As contemporary Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei 艾未未 and Xu Bing 徐冰 made their names in the international art market, a certain style, or aesthetics, is expected of contemporary Chinese art from curators and art critics: those openly critical of the Chinese state and those reproducing stereotypical images of Chineseness are valued. Most queer Chinese art does not sell, and most are made by young and budding artists; most do not follow a particular convention or style. These are hardly appealing to curators and art critics. The idea that queerness is about transgression, about crossing boundaries, about challenging norms and perceptions, does not translate well in an international art world that sees ‘Chineseness’ in a rigid and stereotypical way.

Also importantly, there is a lack of art critics, curators, and historians from queer Chinese backgrounds or who are familiar with queer Chinese art. Art critics, curators and historians are gatekeepers in the art world and academic world. Their job is to select artists, evaluate artworks, and introduce them to the public. If they do not see the existence of queer art, or see its value and importance, how can queer art enter museums, art galleries, and history books? Some see queer art as a ‘niche’ thing that do not speak to the ‘universal’ experience, others see queer art lacking in aesthetic and artistic value. But whose ‘universal’ experience does art speak to and who sets up the criteria for such a value judgment?

Q5. The word ‘China’ vs. ‘Sinophone’ carries different weights and histories vis-à-vis the queer. You and contributors refer to Petrus Liu’s work and acknowledge some of these other discursive universes.  How do you see the contributions in this volume in relation to these larger debates about what counts as ‘Chinese’, as ‘Sinophone’, or indeed as queer? 

We are aware of the discussion of China and the Sinophone. While some scholars see the two as binary opposites that are mutually exclusive, we see them as related and complementary categories. We share with Sinophone scholars the desire to deconstruct and decentre an essentialised notion of ‘Chineseness’. As Sinophone scholars do this from the outside, we do it from within. We contend that it is important to see the subversive and resistant potential of queer and feminist work within the PRC to deconstruct a hegemonic, heteropatriarchal construction of ‘Chineseness’. Aware of the heated scholarly debates, we would also like to bypass the debate, as well as the political and ideological divisions, between China and the Sinophone altogether. This is because most of the artists discussed in this book come from and are currently based in the PRC, and most of them identify more with a critical use of ‘Chineseness’ than an uncritical use of the term ‘Sinophone’. Also, if the concept of Sinophone focuses primarily on written language and phonetic sounds, most of the artworks discussed in the book are not based on written words or phonetic sounds. Focusing on the openness of the visual, the tactile, the sensorial as well as the worldmaking potential of artworks allows us to think about both queerness and Chineseness in a more capacious way, one that is not anchored to language, sound and nation states, but opening up borders, boundaries and spaces.

Q6. Your own essay on ‘Imagining Queer Bandung’ breaks new ground by using ‘participatory action research’ (p.203) to organise online public forums after the ‘Queering Bandung’ project—a film festival, podcasting workshop, and filmmaking workshop that took place over eight days in Berlin in 2021.  As you note, ‘[t]he title of the project references the first Asia-Africa Conference—also known as the Bandung Conference—that took place in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, which once marked the height of Third World Solidarity’ (p.203), and the events—including the ones you organised afterward—offer ‘a good example of the queer people of colour’s transnational solidarity and decolonization enacted at a grassroots level outside the purview of nation states” (p.201).  For our readers, can you say more about ‘Queer Bandung’?  What inspired you to organise follow-on events?  How did you learn about the project originally? 

Imagining Queer Banding is a fantastic project. Thanks go to the organisers and participants who have made the filmmaking and podcasting workshops possible. I first heard about the project from queer filmmaker Fan Popo, who also contributed a chapter to the book, in 2021, in the middle of the global pandemic. Fan, together with other diasporic queer filmmakers living in Berlin, organised a series of filmmaking and podcasting workshops, together with a film festival, to foster and celebrate queer people of colour solidarity. This was particularly important at the time because the COVID-19 pandemic made everyone vulnerable, queer people of colour living in diasporic contexts especially so. Their vulnerability lay not only in the racism they experienced in a white, European society, but also the precarity of jobs in white-centred creative and cultural industries. But vulnerability can also be a form of strength, an opportunity to build coalition and solidarity. So I contacted them and invited them to talk about their projects in two online, public events. I also managed to get some funding to pay them an honorarium. I saw these online events as a form of social activism to raise people’s awareness of queer people of colour’s existence and experience, to bring to public attention issues of racism and marginalisation, and to showcase the brilliant work of these wonderful artists.

Since the pandemic started, I have organised a series of events, both online and in-person, with diasporic queer Chinese communities, including the Queer Art of Surviving the Pandemic Workshop, the Queer Arts in the Pandemic Festival, Queer Zine-Making Workshops, and Drag Up! I am in a privileged position of having a stable academic job and having access to some university resources, in a way many artists and community members do not. How to make use of these resources to help queer Chinese communities and promote social justice is a question I’ve constantly been exploring.

Q7. The curator Si Han makes the point that the artworks included in his exhibit Secret Love, while displayed openly in Sweden, can’t be shown in China, (p.148); and in the Introduction you share the insight that ‘a variety of forms only become available to the eyes in transcultural encounters’ (p.7). Si Han also frames this as an almost existential question when he observes that ‘[t]he fear of the visual and its power often leads to the harshest censorship of pictorial art and all forms of visual culture as something threatening. If you cannot be seen, you do not exist’ (p.146) (does a queer tree fall in a forest?). And, referring to the work of Shi Tou, you note that one of the artist’s paintings (Female Friends, 1997) ‘documents not only the feelings of feminist sisterhood, but also the existence of female same-sex intimacy in the 1990s’ (p.10). To what extent is contemporary queer Chinese art only ‘creatable’ either in secret or outside China? Do you see parallels between this kind of paradox and the challenges of dissident art more generally?   

I like the question ‘does a queer tree fall in a forest?’ although I don’t have an answer to this intriguing question. I can think of reasons for both positive and negative answers. Visibility is important, not only in terms of representation but also in terms of access to resources and right to existence. That’s why queer people have constantly been fighting against invisibility and marginalization, and that’s also why we did this book, to make a declaration that queer people and their artworks do exist. However, there is also a value for being invisible, opaque, ambiguous, and not having a name, as in the case of same-sex intimacy in premodern China. There are caveats, though: firstly, the premodern conditions of invisibility do not apply today. We live in a society where the modern epistemologies of visibility and rights have powerfully structured how we see ourselves and others, often through naming and categorizing. Secondly, there should be options, or multiple and contingent approaches, instead of a universal solution for all. Visibility and invisibility should be seen as a choice, not completely free from social conditions. But such a choice is not always available to many people.

Now in answer to your question: contemporary queer Chinese art is not, and should not, be ‘creatable’ only in secret or only outside China. Many of our contributors are based in China, and many – although not all of them – understand their artworks in terms of queer art. In a globalised world, to demarcate between what is inside and what is outside China is a difficult task. Many of our artists have read books, either in Chinese or in English, on queer theory, and some have held exhibitions internationally. Contemporary queer Chinese art should be seen as a continent assemblage that brings together people, ideas, technologies, materials, representations, and affects globally. Binary oppositions such as ‘secret/open’ and ‘in/outside’ risk obscuring the complexity of the global queer art ecology of which queer Chinese art is a part.

On the other hand, it is exactly what happens in China that makes queer art – and a particular expression of queer art – possible in the first place. This includes China’s political and cultural censorship. In this light, being secret, or doing things secretly, should not be merely seen as a constraint, but also as a condition, an enabling factor that encourages queer art production and creativity in a particular way, and that continues to shape queer Chinese art as it is today.

Q8. Premodern art and literature could be understood to have aspects we might interpret retroactively as expressions of gender diversity and queerness. In the book, traditional opera (involving cross-dressing) is mentioned, for example, and of course I always think about Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢 as a work which really ‘queers’ boyhood and sexuality in so many profound ways, even though that was not the book’s ‘agenda’ per se. How do you see the relationship, if any, between contemporary queer Chinese art such as that you have included in this volume, and expressions of gender and sexual diversity from the past?

This is a great question. Dream of the Red Chamber, as well as many other premodern Chinese art and literary works, certainly embodies a lot of queer potential, not least because these works contain depiction of same-sex intimacy, but also because they reveal to us a fascinating world full of queer and trans potential before the modern, Western epistemologies of gender and sexuality took hold. It may be naïve to think about contemporary Chinese art to be a continuation of that history of gender and sexual plurality, but it would be equally problematic to deny the impact of these historical memories, or traces, on contemporary cultural production. Besides traditional Chinese opera, the book also presents the queer use of the Republican era New Year Calendars, as in Shi Tou and Ming Ming’s 明明 artworks. An advantage about thinking of queerness through art is that artworks rely on visual, embodied and affective expressions that are more ambiguous, polysemic and open-ended than written or spoken language that denotes rigid identity categories. As such, artworks are conducive to queer readings; it is useful to think about queerness through art, situated in historical contexts.

Q9. And an impossible question, just for fun: Why art? Why is art important for queer theory and activism?

I started my research into queer Chinese culture by documenting organized forms of queer activism. In the writing up of the book, I realised that there are more ways to do activism than pride parades, street protests or demanding change in legislation; engaging with art and culture is one of them. This has been a key argument of my recent work. Art and culture shouldn’t be seen as peripheral or insignificant. They should be taken seriously for their roles to help people express themselves, bring communities together, and imagine social change. They also help us see beyond the quagmires of the present and open our imaginations to an unknown but more habitable future.

I have always been thinking about what art can do. For me, art is not simply about objectively depicting an already existing world: it is also about creating an image, or imaginary, of a world that can be and that is yet to come. Understanding this is important, because we are no longer confined to an already existing world; we live in a world in constant formation and transformation. For queer people, that also means to believe in social change and have faith in hope. Art is an important part of that queer world-making process. For both queer theorisation and queer activism, this means to reject the self-assured certainty in our knowledge and to embrace the unknown, the open and the fantastic.

Q10. Finally, how can interested readers access additional works or materials on the artists, activists, and curators introduced in the book? Can you recommend them to any other resources, whether in English or Chinese? Other films, events, productions, or artworks to look forward to?

I encourage readers who are interested in the topic to read my books, including Queer Comrades, Queer China, Queer Media in China, Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance, and Contemporary Queer Chinese Art. They are complementary and they all document Chinese queer history and culture from different perspectives. I also encourage readers to read my author’s page on the Routledge website and my Queer Lens column on the Chinese Independent Film Archive website, both of which host some teaching and learning resources on queer Chinese culture.

Unfortunately, there is not a single queer art archive, as queer artworks are scattered everywhere, from individual artists’ homes to art galleries. This highlights the necessity and urgency of creating a more sustainable queer art archive. Interested readers can explore the websites of queer art exhibitions such as Queer Chinese Art Festival, Secret Love, and Spectrosynthesis. For those who are interested in following up the Women’s Arts Festival introduced in the Contemporary Queer Chinese Art book, curator Jiete Li discussed the second iteration of the festival held in Yunnan in this interview. Individual artists’ websites and social media are worth following too. Our book has only scratched the surface of the topic, a fantastic queer Chinese art world is there to be unfolded.

The post Ten Questions for Authors: Contemporary Queer Chinese Art appeared first on The China Story.

China Story editor Linda Jaivin interviews Louisa about her latest book — Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, New York: Riverhead Books, 2022 — which looks at the durability and characteristics of Hong Kong identity from ancient times to the present and restores ‘Hong Kong voices’, in all their power and powerlessness, to the centre of the Hong Kong story.

Q1. The ‘King of Kowloon’ is a man who, convinced that his family owned Kowloon before the British stole it from them, devoted his life to graffiti-ing his genealogical claims to the territory on walls, electricity boxes and numerous other places across Hong Kong. He is a central figure in Indelible City. You even use his calligraphy in your chapter titles. What is it about this marginal yet iconic figure — poor, not well-educated, possibly mad — that makes him the perfect symbol for Hong Kong (so often seen as wealthy, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan)?  

I’ve been really interested in the ‘King of Kowloon’ because he is so fungible and flexible as a symbolic figure, and I think that’s why he’s also so attractive. He’s an almost prismatic figure. How you interpret his symbolism depends on the angle from which you’re looking at him. Very early on, people mainly talked about the fact that he was working-class, marginalised, an outsider, and there was very little discussion at all of his claim over the land, the idea of sovereignty. That was something that came up later as the situation changed in Hong Kong. People began to label him the first localist, but at the same time he was also becoming a brand that represented Hong Kong, a shorthand for Hong Kong. He was commoditised by actual brands, big and small, from the high-end fashion designer William Tang, all the way down to Goods of Desire, who reproduced his calligraphy on underwear and bags – you can buy cushion covers and everything. So he became a commodity as well. Later he was seen as an artist even though he never saw or called himself that. I think it was that potential for him to be viewed in different ways across time that attracted me. When I was doing the ABC podcast, the ‘King of Kowloon’, I talked to people like the legislator Ted Hui, now in exile in Australia and he described the King of Kowloon as ‘a prophet’. Other people called him a shaman. That whole change in the way people viewed him attracted me as a writer, as well as the idea of a mystery, a story that you could really unpack and explore – I’ve always been interested in stories that are hard to tell. I like the challenge and this to me was this sort of ultimate journalistic challenge.

Q2. Discussing Hong Kong’s multiple historical identities and frequently redrawn borders, you liken Hong Kong to a ‘shimmering chimera that was constantly changing shape depending on the angle of viewing.’ You grew up there, worked there as a journalist, have been a visitor and even protester. How has its shape changed in your view?

No place is static, but I think Hong Kong has really changed, and in so many different ways. Its shape has changed physically over the years since I grew up there. The harbour has grown smaller and smaller, and whole areas of the sea have been reclaimed, to make the airport of Chek Lap Kok, for example. So the actual physical shape of Hong Kong has changed, but also its height, as skyscrapers have become ever higher. There have been these physical changes, but there have been other changes as well: it’s a place in motion. But what we see now is an attempt by the Hong Kong government and China to pin down Hong Kong, to cement one version of it and one version of its history — the official narrative. How Hong Kongers have seen themselves and Hong Kong has also changed over the years. Early on it was much more of a sojourners’ place, where people went on the way to somewhere else. It was only in the sixties and seventies that that began to shift. These new cities were being built in the New Territories. You were getting more than one generation of families born in Hong Kong, and it became not just a social destination but a home. Now with these political changes, how the people view Hong Kong is changing yet again and for many Hong Kongers those changes are turning the city that has been home into something quite unrecognisable.

Q3. You write that the history of Eurasians in Hong Kong — a community you have been part of — is one of ‘disappearance’. On the one hand, they were often, as you say, ‘excluded from the clan lineage records that anchored Chinese identity’. On the other, they ‘erased themselves from sight.’ How did this happen, and what does the future look like for Eurasian and other non-Chinese Hong Kong people under the increasingly nationalist regime?

It’s a feature of the history of Eurasians that they have not just been excluded from versions of history, even family history, but that they have excluded and erased themselves. We see that from historical records in the nineteenth century when the very category of Eurasians disappeared, as noone was willing to identify as Eurasian, even though the actual number of Eurasians was increasing at the time. To me, that idea of self-erasure is really tragic.

Back then it was so difficult, almost impossible, to  function as someone who was both Chinese and Western. They would have to choose either to be Chinese, or to be Western, and very few Eurasians managed to navigate that successfully. The nationalism nowadays in Xi Jinping’s China and the Communist Party’s conflation of state and Party, its capture of the very notion of Chineseness is, I think, really alarming for Eurasians and non-Chinese Hong Kong people as well. It’s deliberately exclusionary, and that bodes ill not just for Eurasian people but for Hong Kong’s future as an international city.

Q4. One of the interesting aspects of your book is how, in contrast to so many histories of Hong Kong that begin with the Opium Wars, you examine its ancient histories and myths. One of your interviewees remarks that the King of Kowloon struck such a ‘deep chord’ in Hong Kong because ‘the Cantonese mindset is characterised by a subversive and revolutionary yearning for lost dynasties.’ What does this mean, and why have we not got that memo sooner?

According to Chinese history, Hong Kong was the place to which the last heirs to the Song dynasty fled, and that act of imperial flight left a profound mark on Hong Kong culture. The site of enthronement still exists — there’s even an MTR station named after it — and there’s also a popular feast dish of various delicacies layered in a large bowl — pun choi — that supposedly dates back to that time. My interviewee was also referring to Hong Kong’s physical and political distance from the imperial centre of power, and how that helped shape a rebellious, subversive mindset, which was then amplified by the use of a different language, Cantonese, from the imperial centre. I think that memo — as you put it — hasn’t been passed on because it has not been in the interests of Hong Kong’s successive colonial rulers to frame Hong Kong identity in those terms. Instead, both the British and the Chinese rulers of Hong Kong have hewn closely to the same message: that Hong Kongers have always been purely economic actors without much interest in politics. This has never been true, but it seems they hoped that if they repeated this fiction enough, even Hong Kongers would come to believe it. We can see from the events of the last ten years how wrong that turned out to be.

Q5. What is it about Cantonese, as spoken in Hong Kong, that is so central to Hong Kong identity — and what role has it played in the various protests?

Cantonese is central to Hong Kong identity, because it is the language of Hong Kong, and I use the word ‘language’ advisedly. Many scholars would argue that Cantonese is closer to Classical Chinese than Putonghua, or the standard Mandarin that is spoken on the mainland. In its written form, Cantonese uses ancient participles and fantizi, the traditional characters that are no longer used on the mainland. Cantonese is integral to the Hong Kong identity in many ways. One, because it is not the language of the mainland — until recently, even the Cantonese spoken across the border in Guangzhou was different from the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. Just learning it and speaking Cantonese can be an act of assertion of a separate identity. The nature of Cantonese is profane, it’s sweary, it’s a little bit subversive. The role it has played in the protests has been really interesting. It’s much more flexible than Mandarin. There is this linguistic inventiveness of a level not allowed on the mainland. Protesters were even creating new characters. The most famous example was the creation of a character for ‘freedom c**t’ — using a combination of the three characters that make up freedom 自由 and c**t 閪 (see illustration below) — a phrase that a policeman used against some protesters early on. The protest movement appropriated it and made all these posters and t-shirts using this new Chinese character ‘freedom c**t’, written in Roman letters as ‘freedom-hi’ after the Cantonese pronunciation. These new Chinese characters were unintelligible to mainlanders.

Q6. During the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement of 2014, one of the protest’s leaders, Benny Tai, told you that ‘Hong Kong laws provide the protection for us to have this kind of movement’. Were he and others like him naïve, or were they betrayed, and if so, by whom exactly? Was it possible to foresee the crackdown to come?

I don’t think it’s naive to believe in the rule of law, or to believe in a government that upholds the rule of law. It might have been naive to believe that a government ultimately loyal to the Communist Party of China would uphold a common law system in its jurisdiction, but that’s exactly what ‘One Country Two Systems’ pledged. When he was sentenced for the Umbrella Movement, Umbrella movement co-founder Chan Kin-man said, ‘In the verdict, the judge commented we are naive, believing that by having an Occupy movement we can attain democracy. But what is more naive than believing in One Country Two Systems?’

Hong Kongers have been betrayed at various points in their history by successive rulers in different ways, but this particular betrayal was so painful because Hong Kongers had believed they would be protected by the systems both British and Chinese promised would remain in place for fifty years after the return of sovereignty. There are those who argue that a crackdown was always inevitable, but the speed and scope of that crackdown has been brutal and shocking. I don’t think anyone foresaw how quickly Hong Kong’s institutions would be dismantled, or the huge exodus of Hong Kongers from their home.

Q7. Staying with 2014 for a moment, you describe a poster of the Umbrella Movement that read ‘This is NOT a revolution’ as having ‘said it all’. What is this ‘all’ that it said?

The message was that this was not a movement to overthrow or forcibly replace the government. The Umbrella Movement came after a series of actions  working within the constraints of the system to widen the democratic mandate in choosing a chief executive. The Basic Law had always promised universal suffrage but provided no timetable.  Methods for widening the mandate included running polls, which more than 790,000 people took part in, to find how the population wanted to nominate candidates for chief executive. The aim was to carry out democratic deliberations on reform through popular consultations. The act of civil disobedience that was Occupy Central was originally intended to be a one-day event. The failure of the government to compromise or give any ground during the Umbrella Movement stoked the dissatisfaction that then exploded during 2019.

Q8. You write that watching the protest movement of 2019, you’d had a feeling that people in Hong Kong had been ‘living in a kind of simulacrum, a political make-believe where our imaginations had been colonised for so long that we were desperate to believe whatever our rulers told us, no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary.’ Is there a danger that in the future – even the near future – that the people of Hong Kong will simply move from one simulacrum to another, this one designed by Beijing?

There is a danger that the people of Hong Kong are moving from one reality to another, but the evidence shows that they are far less willing to buy into Beijing’s political make-believe. In this case, the challenge is epistemological. It confronts Hong Kongers on a daily basis, whether it be through high-ranking officials telling outright lies or legal charges against activists and politicians that are blatantly concocted for political ends. The reality that Hong Kong’s rulers are building is not so much a simulacrum but something more akin to a political re-education territory, where actions and words must be policed at all times to avoid violating ill-defined laws that can be applied retroactively. Hong Kongers’ reaction to this can be seen through the large numbers leaving the territory.

Q9. In 2020 you spoke to the playwright Wong Kwok-kui about a series of historical plays he had created several years earlier about Hong Kong. You write that ‘The very existence of the national security legislation restricted our conversation like a corset.’ If open conversation on Hong Kong identity is now impossible, what are the implications for that identity itself?

The implications for Hong Kong identity are far-reaching. We are seeing a campaign against expressions of Hong Kong identity which is playing out across politics, society, education, and all other arenas. One area that is most concerning is the campaign of intimidation to silence academics who study or research Hong Kong identity itself. We’re seeing the same pattern recurring, which begins with attacks by the pro-Beijing state-run newspapers, and often ends with those academics having to leave their jobs and sometimes to flee Hong Kong. This purge of education has targeted people like the eminent sociologist Ching-Kwan Lee, the political scientist Brian Fong, and cultural studies scholars Law Wing-sang and Hui Po-keung. These attacks muzzle these scholars and try to discredit their work, with the long-term aim of rewriting Hong Kong’s history so that it conforms to the Communist Party of China’s official narrative. I remember in 2019 one of my sources told me that they feared that the phrase  ‘heunggongyan’ 香港人 or ‘Hong Konger’ would itself one day be illegal. At the time, I thought they were overreacting. Today I fear that day is approaching.

Q10. You make a convincing case that by August 2021, Hong Kong was no longer what it used to be — culturally and intellectually vibrant and as a haven for political and other non-conformists in the Chinese world. What then is ‘indelible’ about the ‘Indelible City’?

Hong Kong is such a layered place, as literally shown by the city’s walls with their layers of political graffiti. Layers may be covered over, but they often also resurface in unexpected ways and at unexpected times. Even if the outward manifestations of protest are covered up, those expressions of discontent have been written onto the brains of Hong Kongers over the years in a way that cannot be reformatted. I like the contrast this title makes with my last book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, which refers to the way that the CCP managed to excise memories of the killings of 1989 and silence discussion, even by those who were witnesses. That same playbook will not work with Hong Kongers. Figures show that 140,000 people left the territory in the first three months of 2020 alone. I think that’s testament to the fact that Hong Kongers would rather leave their hometown forever than sacrifice their freedom of thought.

The post Ten Questions for Authors: Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong appeared first on The China Story.

Questions prepared by Ke Ren

Q1. Chiang Yee and His Circle was inspired by a pair of events in Oxford in the summer of 2019: the unveiling of an English Heritage Blue Plaque to commemorate Chiang Yee (only the third Chinese figure to be so honoured) and an accompanying symposium at the Ashmolean Museum to celebrate Chiang’s life and work. What is the significance of this public commemoration and renewed attention to Chiang Yee in the UK?

In the summer of 2019, a symposium was held to mark the years that writer and artist Chiang Yee 蔣彝 (1903-1977) spent in Oxford more than half a century before. The symposium was organised by Anne Witchard and took place at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, (at a time when Paul Bevan was working there as Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting). The papers given were early versions of what would later become the basis for individual chapters of the book, Chiang Yee and His Circle. They were presented by Diana Yeh, Sarah Cheang, Frances Wood, Tessa Thorniley, Paul French and the three editors of the book. Later on, two additional contributors were invited to write chapters: Ke Ren, of the College of the Holy Cross in the US, and Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford. Craig had been a member of the audience at the conference and was involved in organising the erection of a commemorative Blue Plaque in Chiang Yee’s memory. Blue Plaques, erected by various organisations (in the case of Chiang Yee, the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board) can be seen all over the UK, put up to commemorate people of note at their former residences. To date, only three Chinese figures have Blue Plaques in their memory: novelist, Lao She 老舍 (1899-1966); ‘Father of Modern China’ Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 (1866-1925); and Chiang Yee, who lived at 28 Southmoor Road, Oxford from 1940 to 1955. It is hoped that more will follow. One possible candidate for this might be, Shih-I Hsiung 熊式一 (1902-1991), Chiang Yee’s associate and friend, who also became an Oxford resident in the 1940s. Chiang Yee’s biographer, Da Zheng, was a special guest at the unveiling of the plaque, as well as the keynote speaker at the symposium, having made his way to Oxford from Boston in the USA. Following the symposium, on one of the hottest days of the summer, a number of the audience made their way on foot to where the plaque was to be unveiled. In Southmoor Road, the current owners of the house opened their doors and offered their hospitality to the assembled crowd.

Even though Chiang Yee may not be a household name, there is a growing interest in his books amongst the general reading public and in academia worldwide. It is hoped that this collection will be read by those who are already familiar with his writings, as well as new readers attracted by the fascinating story of Chiang Yee and his circle in the UK.

Q2. This book tells the story of a group of Chinese writers and artists who gathered in the Hampstead neighbourhood in Northwest London in the 1930s. How did this area become such a central node of a diasporic cultural network, and how does this story revise our conventional images of Chinese life in Britain in the early to mid-twentieth century?

In the 1930s, the Borough of Hampstead was home to one of the most vibrant artistic communities in the UK. It was in this area of North London (now in the Borough of Camden), that Chiang Yee and Shih-I Hsiung lived, before they were forced to relocate to Oxford after the destruction of their homes in the London Blitz. While in Hampstead, their neighbours included other Chinese friends and colleagues, the historian Tsui Chi 崔驥 (1909-1950), and poets Wang Lixi 王禮錫 (1901-1939) and Lu Jingqing 陸晶清 (1907-1993), as well as countless other artists and writers, some well-known, others now forgotten. Close by to the homes of the Chinese intellectuals, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson had their studios. This group of English artists was dubbed ‘A Gentle Nest of Artists’ by their friend, local resident, poet and art critic, Herbert Read.

Just around the corner from them, in Lawn Road, was the modernist block of flats now known as the ‘Isokon’. Built by Jack Pritchard and designed by Wells Coates, it was inspired by continental architectural movements. Members of the Bauhaus who had fled Germany due to persecution from the Nazi government, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, all lived for a time in or around the modernist block of flats, working on their own designs in London. Other artists made their homes close by, many of them also having fled Nazi persecution. From the point of view of sheer numbers, perhaps the most notable group of artists was the Artists’ International Association, the mostly left-wing members of which aligned themselves with the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union.

The single figure who linked these diverse groups together was Herbert Read, a friend and neighbour of Chiang Yee. Read contributed prefaces for two of Chiang Yee’s books. In his publications of the time, Chiang Yee wrote about Read and other friends, the local streets of Belsize Park and Hampstead, and his daily walks on nearby Hampstead Heath.

The Chinese writers and artists have received far less attention than other artists who lived in the area. This book goes some way to revising the conventional view of what made Hampstead famous as a flourishing artistic area in London.

Q3. How did the writings and lectures by Chiang Yee and his cohort help transform British understandings of Chinese culture (including Chinese aesthetics and art in the 1930s) and challenge pre-existing stereotypes?

In the 1930s, the British public’s knowledge of China and ‘the Chinese’ was limited. Exposure to China through films and novels, more often than not, showed Chinese people in a less than complimentary light. Sax Rohmer’s evil genius, Fu Manchu, the murderous Mr. Wu, and Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown, all displayed highly exoticized versions of an imagined Orient that persuaded a British audience of the iniquities of China and the Chinese people. Chiang Yee and Shih-I Hsiung were amongst a growing number of people in the 1930s who were able to present another aspect of China to the British public. They did this partly through the broadcasts they made for BBC Radio on various aspects of Chinese culture, but also through their published writings. Even though Hsiung’s hit West End play Lady Precious Stream (1934) itself showed a watered down and somewhat distorted version of Chinese drama, he certainly had no intention of displaying China in a bad light, and it became highly popular at a time when a China craze had already taken hold in certain quarters of fashionable British society. It was at this time that Chiang Yee was able to carve out a niche for himself as a writer and artist, with the publication of a series of highly popular books that sold themselves on the notion of Britain seen through Chinese eyes. The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland, published in 1937, was the first of these. They helped to transform public opinion about Chinese people in Britain.

Q4. Chiang Yee is known for his persona of ‘the Silent Traveller’ in his widely-read Silent Travellers series. What new light does your book shed on the self-fashioning of cross-cultural identities by Chinese writers and other personalities in Britain?

In the early 1930s, right before his departure for London, Chiang Yee created a new name for himself: Zhongya 重啞, meaning completely mute or dumb. Disappointed by the rampant corruption he had witnessed within in the Kuomintang, the ruling party at the time, Chiang resigned from his post of county magistrate and vowed never again to be involved in politics. Not long after his arrival in London, he began to use the pen name Yaxingzhe 啞行者, that is, ‘the Silent Traveller’. It was a deliberate choice. The word ‘Silent’, or mute, expressed his sense of language inadequacy, uprootedness, and alienation as he strived to establish a new cultural identity in the West. Chiang used this pen name for the titles of his travel series, such as The Silent Traveller in Oxford and The Silent Traveller in New York. People soon realized that this persona — a Chinese man, always wearing a smile on his face, walking slowly and pensively — was in fact extraordinarily observant and wise. He drew people’s attention to things around them that had often been overlooked, and he would make interesting comments both refreshing and convincing. His writings, humorous and relatable, have won the hearts of thousands of readers throughout the world. Chiang’s self-fashioning in this case proved successful, and it was a strategy employed by his fellow writers and friends as well. For example, Wang Lixi, a passionate poet and political activist, adopted the English name ‘Shelley Wang’, after the Romantic poet Percy Shelley. The name underlined similarities between the two in their fiery revolutionary fervor and poetic energy. Clothing and bilingualism are some other examples. Chiang Yee and Shih-I Hsiung often dressed in traditional Chinese scholar gowns or cited Chinese classical poems in their work to remind the public of their cross-cultural identities.

Q5. A notable aspect of this collection of essays is that it touches on engagement by the Chinese in Britain with cultural production beyond writing and art to ballet and film, for example. How does this complicate our understandings of the different cultural spaces and genres open to Chinese artists in Britain at the time?

We think it fair to say that historians have generally overlooked Chinese engagement with cultural production in Britain during the early twentieth century. Histories of the Chinese diaspora are inclined to focus on the dockside communities of working men, with some acknowledgement of transient students, such as the poet Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897-1931), who studied in the US and then Great Britain between 1918 and 1922, for example. Initially we focused just on Chiang Yee, who was equally artist and writer, and who combined these talents to great popular effect. Once we began delving into the histories of his cohort in this country, a highly educated group of men and women, we became aware of how diligently they worked to foster connections with London’s cultural elites. The modernist appreciation of a Chinese visual aesthetic, thanks to the efforts of art critics like Laurence Binyon and Roger Fry, paved the way for the acceptance of an ‘authentic Chinese’ voice in painterly circles. By the 1930s (often in the interests of political anti-fascism) sympathetic publishers, broadcasters, journal editors, theatre producers, composers, and choreographers actively sought out Chinese contributors and collaborators, widening the group’s access to creative work in a range of genres and so encouraging their artistic versatility.

Indeed, Chiang Yee and many other Chinese engaged with various aspects of cultural production, often experimenting and exploring new forms. Anne’s essay discusses Chiang Yee’s stage and costume design for the ballet The Birds. Likewise, Shih-I Hsiung attempted to make films, as Paul Bevan’s essay reveals. And some of these writers prepared scripts for the BBC and even broadcast on its radio programs. Chiang Yee was the first artist in the world to paint the giant panda, promoting its image in his artworks and children’s books.

Q6. As you note in the Introduction, the Chinese personalities featured in this book inhabited ‘a world of literary and artistic interconnectedness and wartime co-operation that is only now beginning to be explored in scholarship.’ How did both the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War Two in Europe condition the writings and public activities of Chiang Yee and his cohort and create new opportunities for other Chinese writers in Britain?

It was following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 that a number of literary editors in Britain, particularly those politically inclined to the Left who viewed Japan’s invasion of China as an act of fascist aggression, began to seek out and publish short stories by contemporary Chinese writers. Among the publications they represented were: New Writing and its highly successful offshoot The Penguin New Writing, Left Review, The New Statesman & Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, The Listener, Life & Letters Today and Time & Tide.

As the brutality of the Japanese occupation of China began to be reported in the West, editors and publishers sympathetic to China’s cause concluded that literature had a vital role to play in bringing about China’s salvation. The writer Hsiao Ch’ien 蕭乾 (1910-1999) commented that the moment ‘China began to exist in the eyes of the British’ was 7 December 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. He noted that publishers, radio broadcasters and film studios increasingly approached him to work on cultural projects that might demystify China for the British. All at once, Hsiao found that he was no longer viewed as an ‘enemy alien’ but instead as a ‘member of the grand alliance’. China’s new ally status sparked a higher demand in Britain for books about contemporary China, such as those offered in the Penguin Specials series of short polemical works and many of Gollancz’s Left Book Club titles. Hsiao’s survey of contemporary Chinese literature, Etchings of a Tormented Age persuaded Eric Blair (better known by his pen name George Orwell), Head of the BBC’s Far Eastern Division, that a series on Chinese writers was overdue. World War Two then was a key moment when Chinese writers in Britain, supported by a network of editors and publishers, sought to enhance understanding of their country and their people through literature and other cultural expressions.

Q7. The circle of Chinese writers and artists explored in this volume also includes such figures as Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, Wang Lixi and Lu Jingqing, Tsui Chi, Hsiao Ch’ien, Chun-chan Yeh, and Yang Xianyi. Did they always collaborate or were their friendships impacted by what one author calls ‘the economy of racial representation’ and if so, how?

The memoirs, biographies, and correspondence which document this period of their lives show that they shared not only their homes, family life and friendship, but also their professional networks. They were generous with their contacts and introductions. For example, Shih-I Hsiung introduced Chiang to his publisher at Methuen and later Chiang wrote Methuen a passionate letter of recommendation on behalf of Chun-chan Yeh 葉君健 (1914-1999). During the war, Chiang recommended Hsiao, Hsiung and later Yeh to the BBC as substitute speakers when he was not available, and he put forward Tsui in discussions over the publication of children’s books about Chinese history for Puffin Books. However, as Diana Yeh’s essay argues, although their association was characterised by collaboration and conviviality, their solidarity as writers and artists was also threatened by the political economy of racial representation. With only a limited number of Chinese artists or writers admitted to visibility, they were inevitably burdened with the expectation that they were representing their ‘culture’ or nation. Contestations over what kinds of ‘Chineseness’ should be represented became fraught with tension. Hsiung participated in this economy out of perceived necessity. His experiences in navigating the British cultural world had shown that he could best gain visibility by crafting an aura of exoticised Chineseness that appealed to a Western audience, hence the popularity of his play Lady Precious Stream. As migrants who were also artists they had a shared calling — that of contesting dominant perceptions of the Chinese circulating in Europe and the USA. Yet the way in which they carried the burden of representation tested their relationships. Not only Chiang and Hsiung, but also many other prominent diasporic Chinese figures in their circles at the time, came to confront each other as competitors, rather than allies.

Q8. One key shared experience among these Chinese writers and artists is that of exile, exacerbated by the Japanese invasion of their homeland. Yet Britain too was threatened with aerial attacks. They had to choose whether they would stay in Britain, return to China, or move elsewhere. How do themes of exile, displacement, belonging and community figure in their life, work, and legacy?

This is an important question. Indeed, the Japanese invasion in the 1930s affected these Chinese writers and artists stranded in Britain. While some went back to China to participate in the war of resistance, many stayed overseas. Among them were Chiang Yee, Shih-I Hsiung, Tsui Chi, Hsiao Ch’ien, and Yang Xianyi 楊憲益 (1915-2009). It was devastating since they were thousands of miles from their homeland, and they were constantly worried about the safety and whereabouts of their family members and friends. Then in September 1939, war broke out in Europe. London was no longer a safe haven, and they had to evacuate to neighbouring cities. Despite all this, they forged ahead courageously, promoting Chinese culture, educating the public about the significance of the Chinese resistance against Japanese invasion, and raising funds for aid to China. After the Chiang Kai-shek government fled to Taiwan in 1949, and the communists established the People’s Republic of China, many of these Chinese nationals faced a new round of difficult choices: returning to China, moving to Taiwan, or remaining overseas as stateless citizens. Chiang Yee, Shih-I Hsiung, Tsui Chi, Sye Ko Ho, Ling Shuhua, among others, decided to stay abroad. They faced serious challenges. To survive, they had to take up new jobs. For example, Sye Ko Ho and Kenneth Lo, both former diplomats, ended up in the restaurant business, and Hsiung accepted a poorly paid, short-term teaching appointment at Cambridge. For the next two decades, they could not visit mainland China because of the Cold War, nor could they communicate freely with their families there. Frances Wood’s essay, ‘Mahjong in Maida Vale’ vividly reconstructs the daily lives of the wives of Chinese exiles in London in the 1950s. These women gathered together, playing mahjong and cooking, as a way to empower themselves and support each other. It reminded us of Amy Tan’s popular novel The Joy Luck Club, which was set in the United States.

Q9. In recent years, there have been rising tensions in China’s relationship with Britain and the West. At the same time, we have also seen the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment and anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic that has severely affected Chinese diasporic communities around the world. How might the cross-cultural stories of Chiang Yee and his fellow artists and intellectuals help mitigate recurrent misunderstandings of overseas Chinese in our own time?

There has been frequent media coverage about anti-China sentiment and anti-Asian violence in the past few years. This is a very disturbing phenomenon. Nearly a century ago, when Chiang Yee arrived in Britain, he observed widespread discrimination, prejudice, and misunderstanding. Films, stage productions, and publications portrayed Chinese as ignorant, dirty, sinister, and backward.

Chiang Yee, Shih-I Hsiung, and other fellow Chinese often met young children on the street who chanted racial slurs at them. Sarah Cheang’s essay ‘Being Chiang Yee: Feeling, Difference, and Storytelling’ discusses Chiang’s responses to that. Chiang was conscious that some people would view him as inscrutable and odd simply because of his Asian features. Rather than feeling upset or reacting angrily, he used humor and diplomacy, turning those otherwise unpleasant experiences into opportunities to display his human side, make connections, and show commonalities between the East and West. Chiang Yee believed that all human beings, despite differences in language, religion, skin colour and cultural practices, share essential values. He explored those commonalities through travel and travel writing. Chiang Yee and his fellow Chinese writers saw an urgent need for mutual understanding and appreciation, and they dedicated themselves to introducing Chinese culture to the West. Today, as we are confronted with the politics of race and racism in our society, interpersonal communication and cultural exchanges are still an effective way to eradicate prejudices and misconceptions and to bring people together. In that sense, Chiang Yee and His Circle is a timely publication. It is not just a new interpretation of the historical past; it also offers an inspiring direction for moving forward.

Q10. How can interested readers access original writings and artworks by Chiang Yee and the other Chinese artists and authors? Are there reprints and translations that you could point us to?

There has been a growing interest in the cross-cultural contributions of earlier generations. Beginning in 2002, seven Silent Traveller titles have been reprinted in Britain and the United States. Since Chiang Yee’s books were mostly written in English, targeting the audience in the West, his books were not available in bookstores in China for half a century. Since 2005, eight Silent Traveller titles have been translated and published in Taiwan and China. Readers also welcomed Chinese translations of his novel The Men of the Burma Road, the memoir A Chinese Childhood, and the monograph Chinese Calligraphy. Likewise, many of the writings by Shih-I Hsiung, Hsiao Ch’ien, Wang Lixi, Yang Xianyi have been translated or published in Chinese and English. Chiang Yee and His Circle includes a bibliography, which lists a number of related publications and is a good source of broader information. It is our hope that the book will stimulate scholarly interest in the field and lead to more discussion and further discoveries about the Chinese in Britain during the twentieth century and beyond.

The post Ten Questions for Authors: Chiang Yee and His Circle appeared first on The China Story.