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Literary Festival
Tuesday, 16 March 2010 06:03 Written by Urbanatomy Author Mo Zhi Hong discusses China’s post-80s generation He will speak Saturday, March 20 at 4pm in the Crystal Room 7/F   Singapore-born Aucklander Mo Zhi Hong did pretty well with his first book, The Year of the Shanghai Shark, winning the regional Best First Book Award section of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Bracingly free of clichés about China, it tells the story of Hai Long, a teenager in Dalian with the usual teenage preoccupations – basketball, girls and friends. But when he drops out of school to learn the trade from his uncle, a professional pickpocket who specializes in targeting careless foreigners, life gets more complicated. Set during the SARS epidemic, it’s a thoroughly contemporary and impressive debut from this well-traveled author. Your book The Year of Shanghai Shark is about China’s post-80s generation. How did you research your characters? Who did you base the main protagonist Hai Long on, for instance? I was working as an English teacher at a private school in China back to that time. Most of the students in my class were born in the 80s and they’re the best resource. Hai Long is not based on a specific person. What gave you the idea for the novel in the first place? Why did this story need to be told? Living in China and watching people around me gave me the idea of writing a book for them. I was living in the mainland from 2001 to 2005 and during that time China gained more and more international attentions. In additional, westerns are curious about this oriental country. The Year of Shanghai Shark is an introduction to people who want but don’t know China yet. You write about China and yet are an overseas Chinese. Is it difficult for you to talk about such a complicated subject as China yet living most of your life overseas? What difficulties did this pose to your writing of the novel? Did people ever question the authenticity of your story? To be honest, I didn’t feel difficult at that time since I was living with my girl friend’s family. She is a local Dalian girl and that’s why I set the story in Dalian. Thought I found the subject more complicated and profound during writing, novel is supposed to be symbolic rather than actual. Moreover, no one can view any phenomenon through every aspect. Did you write the book for Westerners or Chinese or Both? How has the book been received among Westerners and Chinese? What feedback has astonished you the most about the book? Definitely Westerners. I don’t think many Chinese have read my book, even if they’re much be Chinese raised in foreign countries. My book is received quiet well by critics and most of the feedbacks from the readers are positive. Do you have other books in you? Will you keep writing stories about China? Yes, I am going to write another story. The protagonist will be a Chinese who lives in New Zealand. The story will talk about cross culture and integration. I won’t be constantly writing stories about China, however my feature works will still have Chinese flavor Will your book ever be published in mainland China? I don’t think so. At least my debut will ever be published in China. As I said, The Year of Shanghai Shark is a book for people who don’t know China. What can we expect from you at next year’s literature festival? Why are you here? My schedule is not entirely fixed yet. But I will be presenting speeches in schools, exchanging ideas of writing, reading and culture with the students. I am glad that I traveled around the world. It is positive in general and inspiring as well. As a Chinese writer, my identity and experience gave me a lot of inspirations and acute view. I’d like to share my knowledge and thoughts with other writers. Add comment (0)
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Literary Festival
Tuesday, 16 March 2010 02:03 Written by Urbanatomy Francesca Marciano talks books and films. Francesca will talk about her novels on Saturday, March 20 at 12pm in the Crystal Room 7/F Italian author Francesca Marciano is not only a novelist, but an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, too. Her books have a cinematic sweep to them. Her first novel, Rules of the Wild: A Novel of Africa, portrayed expat life in Kenya, drawing on her own experiences living there. She brought the same eye for human detail to her follow-up, Casa Rossa, about three generations of a southern Italian family. Another novel, another continent: her latest book, The End of Manners, is set in modern-day Kabul, with two women, one an English magazine writer, the other an Italian photojournalist. Together they build a friendship in a brutal, frightening place, where taking photographs of women is forbidden.  What advice would you give a young writer to get into the screenwriting business? To stay away from ‘how to’ books which tell you at exactly which page things should happen read a lot of good scripts. There are several websites where one can download lots of titles. To find a compelling subject and research it thoroughly. To be very specific in order to avoid clichès. To keep always in mind the screen writer mantra: Is this scene moving the story forward? If not, cut it. Who is the best character ever written for the screen? Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, and RP McMurphy (aka Jack Nicholson in One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) are two that come to mind, especially considering when they were written. Your favorite script is… ? Sunset Boulevard? Chinatown? Short Cuts? Magnolia? I could go on forever, it's impossible to say, there are too many masterpieces out there. I can think of recent films which are not necessarily my favorite of all time, although these keep changing. Last week it was Up in the Air. The dialogue is totally brilliant and I loved the quirkiness of the story and the absence of the predictable happy ending. Screenwriters I admire are the Cohen Brothers, Paul Haggis, Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Solonz and Matteo Garrone. Woody Allen should be in the list. What would be our life like, had he not written a single film? His humor has become an asset we can all take advantage of. Also, good film scripts usually have very spare dialogue. Just like in a Cormack McCarthy book: you can go a long way without dialogue, given you know where you are heading. You come from a long tradition of novelists who have ventured into film writing. Is better to be a nov elist or a screenwriter or both? It’s actually the other way around. I have been a film writer who ventured into literature. Both careers have their own constrictions and liberties. I guess the enormous freedom of the novelist resides in the fact that he or she can be inside their character’s mind (take Ulysses as the extreme example of what I’m trying to prove) and can surf through thoughts, reflections, swaying backwards and forwards just like our minds do all day. As long as the voice of the narrator is authentic, the story can be impalpable, its shape undefined. Movie writing on the other hand, is all about structure, film scripts are only made of material that is visible, the inner voice doesn’t count. There are structural rules, more engineering and less art. To answer the question, a bit of both keeps me trained in both the physical and the invisible world. Which is a healthy exercise in observation of human nature. 
Literary Festival
Friday, 12 March 2010 01:03 Written by Urbanatomy Q&A with Rachel Kushner, an American National Book Award finalist. Kushner will be speaking at Lit Fest Saturday at 4 pm at Crystal Room, 7/F. Foreigners living in exotic climes, rich enough to lord it over the natives, ignoring the inequality around them and making plenty of money, until one day it all suddenly ends. Sound like a snapshot from the last century of anywhere you know? But in LA-based art writer Rachel Kushner’s first novel, Telex From Cuba, we’re talking gringos, not laowai.An avowedly political novel, seen mostly through the eyes of two young girls, it’s about the end of an era in Cuba, and all the more timely with another era apparently on the verge of ending in America’s bete noire nation. Why did a story about revolutionary 50s Cuba need to be told?  Necessity is a tough thing to argue for, in the realm of literature. I can’t say it needed to be told, only that it hadn’t yet been told, at least not the story of the Americans who lived there, and the more I dug in the more I realized what a fun and complex challenge it would be for me to recreate a lost world, and to unravel some of the strings that implicated the Americans, in terms of their relationship to Batista’s government, which partly led to their own ejection from the place. And why did you personally feel the need to tell it? My grandparents had lived in one of the two American colonies that figure in the novel, so I had direct access to a lot of ‘material.’ I was looking at Life Magazine photos of my grandfather’s colleagues at the nickel plant where he was a manager. They’d been kidnapped by Raul Castro, and were slopping out of hammocks and puffing on cigars, playing fast-draw with loaded guns the Cuban rebels gave them, and it seemed surreal and funny and to have its own gravity, I thought, the situation of their kidnapping. Why choose this subject matter for a first novel? I didn’t want to write a semi-autobiographical something or other. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with it—it’s quite natural, and has been done beautifully over and over. It just was not my instinct. I reveled, actually, in this long (six year) vacation from the self, in terms of the place I went daily, to weave story. And in any case maybe my own process of locating the self is by traveling through other territories, ideas, notions, concepts, places. I’m not familiar with this specific expression “difficult second album” but I like its ambiguity: ‘difficult’ in the realm of aesthetics can mean more challenging and less mainstream, more interesting and maybe terrific but less popular, etc. That seems like an ok place to go, frankly. In fact I should be so lucky. The first novel is one’s only moment, in a way, to become, to prove herself and have a place in the publishing world. Once the writer has successfully done that, shouldn’t it free her up to take risks?
Literary Festival
Wednesday, 03 March 2010 05:03 Written by Aelred Doyle Take a ride with the acclaimed China chronicler Peter Hessler made an immediate name for himself in 2001 with River Town, the story of the two years he spent as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching in a Sichuan school and learning Chinese. The outstanding journalism about China (in places like The Atlantic and The New York Times) that followed that clear-eyed and moving book confirmed that he was a real voice to be reckoned with, someone willing to try to get a handle on China with a refreshing balance of open-mindedness and rigor. By the time he came out with his ecstatically reviewed second book, Oracle Bones, a look at Chinese history with his signature attention to ordinary people in undistinguished places, he was already the China writer’s China writer, and probably the most read among expats. Below he talks about his eagerly awaited new book, Country Driving (reviewed here), the story of his journeys all around the nation. We've seen you describe yourself as shy, yet in Country Driving you strike up conversations with huge numbers of strangers. Were these interactions more difficult than you make them seem? In Chinese I¹m less guarded and probably more jokey, as people generally respond well to that. A lot of this comes from my Peace Corps experience, when I was one of two foreigners in Fuling. The pressure was very intense at the beginning; there was an enormous amount of attention on me. I was either going to learn to deal with it and interact with people; or I would have to retreat to my apartment and spend two years alone. It took a while but in the end I became comfortable with most situations. 
Literary Festival
Wednesday, 03 March 2010 04:03 Written by JFK Miller An interview with the busiest bookworm on the Bund. Your funniest/favorite/weirdest festival experience ever was... ? |
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