CWN#9.5: On literary community
A personal reflection, one year in
Today, something a little different. This idea has been percolating since a conversation I had this past summer with my friend and fellow Substacker Jing Jing P. We noticed that, while each of us examines China from a non-Chinese perspective, I tend to remove myself from my own writing, as though by passing myself off as a lofty, disembodied observer I can make my book recommendations carry more weight.
To mark the one-year anniversary of this newsletter, I’m putting myself back in the narrative. What does it mean for me, as a non-native speaker of Chinese, to write about Chinese literature?
Summer 2025 was an oddly appropriate time for me to be rethinking my relationship to this literature. For the first time since I became paying close attention to new literary releases in China about five years ago, young writers were making headlines in China, but it was for all the wrong reasons. In a series of viral social media posts, amateur sleuths were screenshotting recent fiction that appeared to plagiarize (mostly) classic literary works—Yu Dafu, Zhang Ailing, even the Chinese edition of Madame Bovary. The screenshots were more damning in some cases than others, but even where the evidence was thin, the damage was done. At least ten young authors were thrust from the niche literary periodical circuit into the furnace of public discourse virtually overnight.1
For those of us who follow new Chinese literature, native and non-native readers alike, the plagiarism scandal brought up uncomfortable questions about our ability to accurately judge literary quality. I was at that point preparing a post grandly entitled “The Best Chinese Short Fiction of 2025,” and seeing some of the authors I had been planning on recommending suddenly fall into disgrace was a disorienting experience. It struck me that making absolute proclamations about the value of any stories from China was not something I was in a position to do. Nor, really, is it what I’m trying to achieve with this newsletter in the first place.
When I recommend writers, it is always from the perspective of an outsider. I’m a non-native speaker of Chinese, an American master’s student in Beijing, an incurably slow reader of fiction in my second language. In many respects, I’m proud of these identities. I find that the extra effort it takes me to read Chinese books tends to make them resonate with me that much more forcefully. I’d like to think that my outside perspective gives some weight to my judgments of which stories might connect with other international readers in translation (or challenge and unsettle them in productive ways). But we need native perspectives on the literature too, and that’s something I can’t provide.
This newsletter is not an attempt to define which Chinese stories are good or bad—rather, it’s a first attempt to bring them into a new cultural/linguistic context. That’s what world literature is: the effort of transforming of a culturally specific piece of writing into one that can be collectively experienced by many readers of many cultures. I like the subversive nature of world literature, its power to build covert communities of readers right under the noses of political regimes that are trying to limit exchange with the rest of the world.
One of the main things bringing me hope these days is seeing people form cross-border literary communities through the act of reading. I see symptoms of this everywhere in China: in the eclectic parade of international authors marching across the top of the Douban literature charts, from Yoko Tawada and Norman Erikson Pasaribu to Mosab Abu Toha and Guadalupe Nettal; in popular collections by Chinese essayists reflecting on García Márquez and Mrs. Dalloway; and, yes, in smutty fanfiction about Tom Riddle and Lin Daiyu.
Literary trends in my home country make me oddly hopeful too. As marginal as translated books have always been in American publishing, I do see signs of them becoming as central—slowly, slowly—as domestic ones. The American graphic novels market for adults is already driven by manga and manhwa. Every few months, a foreign throwback like Osamu Dazai or Jacqueline Harpman becomes inexplicably TikTok-famous. And when Chinese lesbian webfiction finally got an English print run, it stormed the American bestseller lists overnight.
If there’s one thing I feel qualified to do, as a non-native reader and translator of Chinese stories, it’s to try to open up space for silent literary communities to form between Chinese readers and the rest of the world. As other forms of international community are increasingly suppressed, let’s make sure this one continues to grow.
Below, I’ve assembled a small collection of other resources that I’ve found help me feel connected to international literary communities, even for languages that I do not speak.2 Thanks for reading, and see you for a regular post next month.
Chinese literature:
The 跳岛FM podcast (in Chinese—ended this year, but with an extensive archive)
何人斯的书影世界 (in Chinese)
Na Zhong’s What China’s Reading column
Chaos Drifter (on internet literature)
Other literatures:
The Bulaq podcast (on Arabic literature)
The Mangasplaining podcast (on manga!)
The Cha Review of Books and Films (on Asian literature)
One of the best-known, and to my knowledge the only one to publically apologize, was Sun Pin 孙频, a personal favorite writer of mine whom I covered in the third issue of this newsletter. As only a small fraction of her prolific output was implicated, her literary reputation will likely remain strong despite the scandal. I’m choosing not to name the other writers so that their first time being written about in English will not be in connection to the plagiarism allegations.
I know of very few other projects on Substack that focus on this, but I’d love to hear about them.
I’m glad to hear that about Sun Pin, because I too like her writing